| NOTE: Sorry that it took me so long to put this post up. I have been having trouble getting back into the swing of the lightning-fast blogos. These are just a few thoughts I had during the visit from the leader of our judicial system. If you have similar or different reactions, drop a comment.
I have to confess that I was disappointed in Justice Roberts' actual speech. He talked about advice that he gives to young lawyers and law students. His stories were self-depricating and certainly jokesy enough. But I felt like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court should have said something interesting about the state of justice, and instead he gave a bland talk that I have heard one hundred times in law school. Important details make all the difference, and so on. This is really not all that interesting.
Moreover, I did not think that it was aided by his reference to the Montana standard Norman Maclean. He tailored his advice to Montana by comparing it to Young Men and Fire. The gesture was nice, but like I say, the speech itself was a dull truism told countless times to law students, and I cannot imagine being a non-law student with some expectation of greatness. I won't belabor the point. He did end the speech with a fairly funny joke about the judges in hell.
On the other hand, the smaller session that he did before his public talk was much more meaty. He answered questions from students, only--one of my professors thought that this was to prevent an ideological stand by some professor who has been pouring over the same general area for years. I doubt that it would have made much of a difference, since students are often as mired in the minutia as their teachers. Like his performance during his confirmation hearings, Justice Roberts answered all of the questions without resorting to the old mantra: this case may come up before the court. Some people forget that he didn't do much of this during his confirmation hearings because Justice Alito repeated it so bloody often. |
| An email went out to students before the event reminding them that judicial ethics requires remaining silent on some issues. This does not mean that students, or Senators for that matter, cannot get the information that they need about the judges. If the judges simply answer the questions about their judicial philosophies there would be no problem of promising votes, and everyone knows that judicial philosophies are subject to some degree of nuance that can't be fleshed out without the cold, hard facts of a ripe case.
Many students asked questions designed to probe Roberts' judicial philosophy, and I think to both parties' credit they got fair or semi-fair responses. When the true chief justice shone through, there were no real surprises. He is a cold, hard jurist. He does not believe that he should be swayed by the sob stories of the men and women that make it to his doorstep. He believes that the best men and women are generally chosen to sit on the bench, and was relatively dismissive of concerns that the bench lacks diversity. None of this was surprising, in a George W. Bush nominee to the Supreme Court. It also wasn't the sort of sexy, wild bigotry that some of the gathering expected, no doubt. That seems to be the bold, unchanging truth about the Supreme Court. It is made up of dull old judges mostly, and when Justice Roberts actually grows old he will fit in flush with the others.
Other students asked questions that were meant to trap the chief justice. Much as he did in the Senate hearings, Justice Roberts answered these questions by talking about the law and legal perspectives, generally. These dodges were like the honed signature moves of a wrestler at the top of his game--they were marked by the flair for drawing the crowd's attention and diverting it from the scam being put on at center stage. Of course, these were the signature moves of this extremely talented appellate litigator during his hearings, and likely during his career as well. The students who asked these questions probably left disappointed that their questions had been craftily dodged, but probably at the same time a little begrudgingly charmed by the funny fellow who boondoggled them.
I left equally charmed. I didn't have the presence of mind to ask a stumper or an intellectually probing question, however. I asked, rather dully, whether the recent rash of mean spirited writing and footnoting had an ill effect on the collegiality among the justices. My phraseology was fair and I drew a few laughs from the crowd and maybe the chief justice as well, but the answer I thought was interesting. He said that he thought that the barbs were really designed to mask shoddy logic or poor argument. Like I said, an interesting, thoughtful answer, but not terribly probing.
I left the show not too fussed about the whole thing. Frankly, I have decided that the answer to the "Roberts problem" and the court diversity problem both have the same answer. We have to elect people that will appoint other people who we can trust. I have no faith that George W. Bush was ever capable of this, and each new day that he teeters and wobbles on his bike across the White House lawn, I think that other people are losing the faith they once had. For this reason (if you have no other), I hope that you will be cautious about who you vote for in the coming election and the primary, too. Rather than just trying to get a Democrat who is an improvement on George W. Bush (challenge of challenges, I know), or, in other words, someone who doesn't suck at everything that the president is supposed to do, let's elect someone who is actually good at the job and has the same values that we have. Let's elect someone we can trust. |
