Showing posts with label Supreme Court. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Supreme Court. Show all posts

Monday, May 10, 2010

MMMMMMMMMM

more subtly invidious is the simple fact that people are so unused to seeing women appointed to the court that it's somehow a scandal to see two of them named in a row. Two women and we're talking about systematic discrimination. And that reaction means that even though the coin says there's an even chance that Obama's next pick will be a woman also, there's probably not an even chance of it, as he'll have to prove that he's not favoring women. After all, it's one thing to appoint 101 men in a row. But three women? Why, that'd be un-American!


Ezra Klein on the odds of getting FF by simple coin toss. (Roughly.)

deanery

Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy on Elena Kagan's qualification to be Supreme Court justice:

The real flaw in Campos’ and Mirengoff’s argument is the implicit assumption that being an outstanding dean requires you to be an outstanding scholar. It doesn’t.

The job of dean is primarily managerial and political. The dean has to manage the faculty and staff, maintain good relations with the university, and raise money. He or she must be a good judge of others’ scholarship, since she plays a key role in faculty appointments. But she doesn’t have to be an outstanding scholar herself. As Campos concedes, most deans don’t do much in the way of scholarship anyway, perhaps because they rarely have the time.

... The skills of a good administrator are very different from those of a good scholar. A reclusive, difficult to get along with person, can be an outstanding scholar but would be a disaster as an administrator. Contrariwise, a skilled manager and politician who is not an original thinker would make a poor scholar. But so long as he values and recognizes original thought in others, he could be an excellent dean.

To return to the case of Kagan, there is little doubt that she was an excellent dean. She successfully hired numerous top scholars in many subfields, and from across the political spectrum. Under her tenure, Harvard arguably managed to surpass Yale and Chicago as the law school with the most productive faculty (I say this despite the fact that I’m a Yale Law grad, and a longtime admirer of Chicago). At the very least, she did a great deal to regain the ground that Harvard lost to its rivals in the 1980s and 90s.

She did this in part by pushing for the hiring of top conservative scholars like Jack Goldsmith and John Manning. In a hiring market characterized by a degree of hostility to non-leftwingers, productive right of center scholars were an undervalued asset similar to the undervalued high-OPS hitters that Beane relied on in his early years with the A’s. More generally, Kagan fostered by word and deed an atmosphere of openness and ideological tolerance at a a school that previously wasn’t exactly well known for either. She deserves special credit for achieving all this at an institution with a famously difficult to manage faculty and at a time of harsh ideological conflict in society as a whole.

The rest here. (HT Ezra Klein)


(All of this is, needless to say, horribly relevant to Ed Esche, Dean of Middlesex University, who was instrumental in the decision to close its distinguished philosophy department. ('But so long as he values and recognizes original thought in others, he could be an excellent dean.') For those who have not been following the story, the Guardian reports on the international response here. The petition to save the department now has over 13,000 signatures; you can add yours here.)

Thursday, September 13, 2007

the new new Constitution

Ronald Dworkin, in the NYRB, 'The Supreme Court Phalanx': chilling piece on the voting patterns and legal reasoning offered for decisions since the appointments of Roberts and Alito.

The revolution that many commentators predicted when President Bush appointed two ultra-right-wing Supreme Court justices is proceeding with breathtaking impatience, and it is a revolution Jacobin in its disdain for tradition and precedent. Bush's choices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, have joined the two previously most right-wing justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in an unbreakable phalanx bent on remaking constitutional law by overruling, most often by stealth, the central constitutional doctrines that generations of past justices, conservative as well as liberal, had constructed.

These doctrines aimed at reducing racial isolation and division, recapturing democracy from big money, establishing reasonable dimensions for freedom of conscience and speech, protecting a woman's right to abortion while recognizing social concerns about how that right is exercised, and establishing a criminal process that is fair as well as effective. The rush of 5–4 decisions at the end of the Court's term undermined the principled base of much of this carefully established doctrine. As Justice Stephen Breyer declared, in a rare lament from the bench, "It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much."
The rest here.