Category: Supreme Court of the United States

Scenes from a tire fire: Day One of the Kavanaugh hearings

Yesterday’s first day of confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh was a colossal embarrassment for everyone, save perhaps the nominee himself. It began with a series of sophomoric interruptions from protesters inside the Senate chamber–an undignified and unfortunate extension of our current national tantrum, which increasingly values volume and resistance over logic or civility. Watching the early minutes of the hearing, I kept waiting for a member of the committee–Chairman Grassley, or for that matter any of the Democrats within whose camp the protesters fell–to make explicit that such interruptions were entirely inappropriate and undignified. I waited in vain. As it was, the ongoing shrieks made it appear that no one really was in control of the moment.

It went largely downhill from there, culminating later in the day in an appalling libel of Judge Kavanaugh’s former clerk Zina Bash by social media trolls on the left, who accused Bash–a Mexican-born granddaughter of Holocaust survivors–of being a white supremacist. The whole event was a sad display of our dysfunctional politics, and a good example of the behavior that judges work to prevent in their own courtrooms.

Indeed, yesterday’s hearing sorely needed a presiding judge–an authority figure with some spine, wisdom, knowledge, and confidence. Nowhere was that better illustrated than during the interminable debate among committee members about the late-produced (or still withheld) documents relating to Judge Kavanaugh’s career. Continue reading “Scenes from a tire fire: Day One of the Kavanaugh hearings”

Kavanaugh hearings livestream

The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh commenced this morning in Washington, DC. The hearings began with a series of objections by Democratic members of the committee to tens of thousands of pages of documents that have been withheld by the White House.

The livestream of the hearings (from CSPAN) can be found here.

 

“The Highest Court in the Land”

Sports Illustrated has lost a couple of steps as it struggles to compete in the new media environment, but it still occasionally puts out a great, original read. With that, I recommend this article by Stanley Kay on the basketball court in the Supreme Court building, and the athletic adventures of its occupants.

Some quick thoughts on the Kavanaugh nomination

A few quick hits on President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court:

  1. Predictions are easy to make, and hard to make correctly. If I were better at this, I would have moved to Vegas already.
  2. Judge Kavanaugh will be subject to the same partisan rancor that has infected our federal judicial nomination process for nearly two decades. But he is surely qualified for the Supreme Court. His dozen years on the D.C. Circuit, as well as his educational and professional background, more than qualify him.
  3. That said, I firmly believe that the President would have been more politically expedient for the President to nominate Joan Larsen (or one of several other former state supreme court justices) for the seat. Judge Kavanaugh is a “safe” pick in part because he has the profile of a consummate Washington insider. Born and raised in Bethesda, his professional career has primarily been spent within the federal government, and he doesn’t appear to have spent much time at all outside the Beltway. (Yale and two clerkships seem to be the bulk of his non-D.C. experience). President Trump had a real opportunity to woo voters in Middle America with a non-East Coast pick, and there were several highly qualified nominees of that sort on his 25-person short list. It is disappointing that someone with greater familiarity with America beyond the Beltway wasn’t picked.
  4. In the same vein, and despite Judge Kavanaugh’s credentials, I am also disappointed that another D.C. Circuit judge will populate the Supreme Court. The Court already has three D.C. Circuit alums (Roberts, Thomas, and Ginsburg). The D.C. Circuit is an important court, to be sure, but it hardly needs four justices out of nine with that limited perspective.
  5. I thought Trump would nominate a woman, if only to create a political advantage over the identity politics-obsessed Democrats in the Senate. The Kavanaugh nomination indicates that Trump was not interested in engaging that dynamic this time around. But it’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t revisit it soon. Perhaps he is counting on another vacancy opening in the next two years; if Justice Ginsburg retires, he could nominate a woman (perhaps an even more seasoned Joan Larsen) and really watch the fur fly.
  6. From the perspective of the courts themselves (and, after all, that’s what this blog is about), the Kavanaugh nomination means more judicial cascades to come. Assuming the nomination is successful, Trump will now have the opportunity to fill Judge Kavanaugh’s D.C. Circuit seat with a (presumably) younger judge of the same qualifications and ideological bent. If he pulls such a judge from the district court ranks, he will have another vacancy for the trial courts as well. Given the record pace with which he is nominating (and the Senate is confirming) federal judges, the courts will have a continued infusion of relatively young (Gen X) judges at all levels.

Predicting the next Supreme Court nominee

Portico_-US_Supreme_Court_BuildingAnthony Kennedy’s impending retirement means it’s open season on predicting who will be nominated to fill his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. I offer my own analysis and prediction below. It’s a familiar name for those who have been paying attention to President Trump’s judicial nominations so far.

The President has confirmed that he intends to nominate someone from the list of 25 candidates previously identified by the White House. That is the only certainty. But it’s still possible to whittle down that list significantly using a combination of logic and observation of the President’s nomination trends.

Continue reading “Predicting the next Supreme Court nominee”

A more detailed (and glowing) look at Rosen’s biography of Taft

I have praised Jeffrey Rosen’s new biography of William Howard Taft on this blog before.  It is a lucidly framed and highly readable look into the life of the only man ever to serve as both President and Chief Justice.

My longer review of Rosen’s book has now been published on JOTWELL. Enjoy!

The editorial drumbeat for courtroom cameras

In the wake of the Bill Cosby retrial, which was not televised due to a ban on cameras in Pennsylvania state courts, the Scranton Times-Tribune has editorialized:

[T]he fundamental premise of the United States is that it is a nation of laws — the notion that the law applies to everyone and that no one is beyond its reach. Yet the state government and in most cases, the federal government, regularly take passes on the opportunity to demonstrate that philosophy as it unfolds in the real world of the courtroom.

When a cultural figure like Cosby or a high-ranking public official, like former state Attorney General Kathleen Kane, or an important civic issue such as taxation or gerrymandering ends up in court, cameras should be there to bring citizens into the courtroom to observe the process and watch history as it happens.

Courts long resisted cameras on grounds that they would be disruptive. But technology long ago resolved that problem. Pennsylvania and federal courts should allow televised trials and other proceedings. Doing so would enhance civics education at a time when it is sorely needed.

Meanwhile, UC Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has made a similar argument with respect to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not every courtroom needs a camera, and not every case or hearing is appropriate for public broadcast. But blanket prohibitions on cameras, especially with respect to cases of broad public interest, are increasingly difficult to justify.

Supreme Court to release same-day audio — in a single case. Oh, joy.

The Supreme Court has announced that it will release same-day audio of April 25’s oral argument in the travel ban case. Normally audio is not released until the end of the week, but in rare cases the Court has agreed to release it the same day.

Thus continues the Court’s counterproductive policy of keeping oral argument out of public view. We should be long past the days when the general public has to rely on the Court’s feigned generosity to be able to observe and hear arguments as they happen. A single camera in the back of the courtroom, live-broadcasting the arguments without additional commentary (something CSPAN perfected two generations ago), is all that is needed.

The ongoing ban on cameras forces reporters to take notes and rush to get information to the public after the argument has concluded. This compromises accuracy, undermines efficiency, and harms transparency — the key sources of the Court’s public legitimacy. When will the Court will finally out an end to this self-inflicted wound?