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Monday, April 26, 2010
Courts - "Pressure Grows to Pick a Nonjudge for the High Court: All nine justices on the current U.S. Supreme Court hail from the federal appellate bench"
Tony Mauro has an interesting report this morning in The National Law Journal, that concludes:
Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter, author of a book on confirmations, said he does not favor an all-judge Supreme Court, but did say, "Judging is a skill, and in theory, one should get better at it the longer one does it."If Obama does pick a nonjudge, Carter urged him not to pick an academic. "Professors who have not been judges are often poor justices. Take [William O.] Douglas and [Felix] Frankfurter. Nobody denies their brilliance, but they were iconoclasts, always writing for themselves, never caring if they were able to change the law, as long as their own opinions were pure. ... In the long run, Douglas and Frankfurter were irrelevant."
Instead, Carter said Warren, the former governor of California who had never been a judge, would be a model for Obama to aim for. "Earl Warren might not have been the greatest legal mind of the century, but he knew how to negotiate and build coalitions," Carter said.
Holland & Knight partner William Sessions, a former federal appellate and trial judge and former director of the FBI, also can understand the call for a nonjudge on the Court. Warren "changed our whole view of the Constitution," Sessions said, and Kagan, another nonjudge, revised Harvard Law's curriculum. Both were "persons of change" without judicial experience, Sessions said.
"There are other views and other visions that relate directly to how our nation runs itself," Sessions said. "I want a person to have that vision, and it can be served by someone other than a judge."
Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 26, 2010 10:46 AM
Posted to Courts in general