October 2, 2006
On this quiet morning, you can almost hear the gavel bang ::
legal — tagged abortion, books, equalprotection, legal, politics and SCOTUS
8:07 am
Well, not literally, because according to the Supreme Court calendar oral arguments don’t start up until tomorrow morning. (Which is actually good news because it will give me a chance to catch up on some of the more interesting cases that the court will be hearing this term.) And as Linda Greenhouse notes in this piece in the NY Times, the court will hear some very important cases this term—namely ones dealing with Congress’ Partial Birth Abortion Ban and two schools’ efforts to acheive racial integration in their schools. My take on the two consolidated cases, distilled into one (long) sentence: It’s hard to tell how the abortion cases (summaries here and here) will turn out; however, if the two school integration cases (summaries here and here) wind up standing it may be for the wrong reasons—that is, local control—and not the right ones—i.e., a more honest application of Equal Protection that has less to do with absolute race blindness and more to do with achieving racial equality after hundreds of years of slavery, segregation, and all the disparities that come with them.
With the oncoming October term, our minds should also turn to the thoughts of fun legal reading. And to fill that mental need comes this 600+ page tome on the life of many a liberal lawyer’s hero, Justice Earl Warren. Apparently, far from painting Warren as a standards-bearer for liberal legal causes, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made doesn’t shy away from the type of figure Warren cut before he made it onto the court:
...Warren was an almost stereotypical Republican before joining the high court. As Jim Newton reveals in his meticulously researched and well-told new biography, “Justice for All,” Warren was a zealous prosecutor, passionately anti-Communist, pro-business, anti-New Deal, anti-gambling, anti-pornography, tough on crime (his father was murdered in their Bakersfield home in 1938), and he favored interning California’s Japanese and their American-born children after Pearl Harbor.
How interesting! One assertion I made in the past was that it was precisely because Republicans of the 1950’s had no political ties to Southern segregationists that they had the freedom to act as both their conscience and the Constitution required them to. Based on the review, it sounds that Warren’s actions once he got on the court were quite consistent with that. But we’ll see what I think after I read the book.
