Sonia Sotomayor

I'm sure her nomination will be approved, but I'm not thrilled by the idea of having her on the Supreme Court.

I supposed she's a liberal, at least by Obama's standards, but she's a liberal who's a huge fan of powerful government and defers to government power of the rights of the individual whenever she has a chance.

Deference to the power of authority seems to be a Catholic trait, and you'd think we already had enough Catholics on the Supreme Court.

The Agitator comments on her pro law enforcement bias.


The Agitator comments on her tendency to value process over substance.

The Agitator comments on her authoritarian streak
.

Hillary on the Supreme Court

Ann Althouse thinks Hillary doesn't have the right judicial temperament for the Supreme Court, whatever the hell that means.

And it doesn't even matter that she has no judicial experience and has never done anything to indicate that she is any sort of a legal scholar or has anything like a judicial temperament.

I think it just means that Ann doesn't like Sen. Clinton.

I don't think much of Clinton either and would not want to see her on the Court. But to argue that Hillary isn't qualified is just absurd.

Hillary has a law degree, from Yale. She worked as a government lawyer. She taught in a law school. She then practiced law and spent a few years as a partner of a large firm. She's a United States Senator.

She's never been a judge, but she certainly has plenty of experience in law wearing pretty much every other hat that can be worn. I'm not sure if she has a publication record, but that doesn't really mean much in law -- the academic journals in law are almost all student edited publications, peer review is not part of legal scholarship.

I think Ann is just letting her emotions about Bill having cheated on his wife get ahead of her brain on this one.

As far as temperament goes, 5 of 9 of the current Court believes in a guy who wears a funny hat who talks personally to God. Is that an indication of what Ann thinks of when she talks about judicial temperment?

Law and Rhetoric

The Supreme Court issued an opinion today about a prison inmate who had a bunch of his stuff stolen from him by prison guards simply because he's a Muslim and they could do it with impunity. The ruling was that they were right, they could do it with impunity. Some statute about US customs was interpreted to mean that prison guards have immunity from any recourse against them or the government stemming from such thefts.

The whole thing is totally irrational, completely ignores any attempt to consider actual facts, and the opinion focuses more on commas than on actual meaning of language.

It's an example of the way the law works. The court just finds some rhetorical bullshit to lead them to the conclusion they want to reach. That's law. That's procedural justice. That's America.

In another example of the absurdity of legal thought in America, the DOJ submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on the current gun case being considered by the court where they argued that the Second Amendment defines an individual right but that the government must be able to ban hand gun ownership because if we don't allow that people will be allowed to run around on the streets with missile launchers. Or something like that. Just absurd.

Bong hits 4 Jesus

Personally I think the idea that the Bong hits 4 Jesus banner had anything to do with drugs is just absurd.

It had to do with flaunting authority, nothing more, nothing less. It's a satire about the official stance on both drugs and religion, poking fun at school officials.

That, of course, can't be tolerated.

The agitator has some comments about the silliness of anti-drug war advocates taking up the case as a cause.

This case always seemed to me like an odd one for the drug reform movement to rally around. This was not an essay calling for the legalization of medical marijuana. It was a lame stunt to get noticed.

The fear was that the Bong Hits case would give the Supreme Court the opportunity give its okay for public schools to censor student political speech in favor of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs. While I'd have been more comfortable had the ruling come down the other way, it seems to me that there's much to take comfort in, here. Five justices have expressly announced that public school censorship of political speech related to the war on drugs won't stand. And it's likely that a sixth (Breyer) would join them.

I agree with him partly, but only partly. I think the SC has shown that they are perfectly willing the drink the Kool-aid in support of the drug war.

Update:
Ann Althouse has a more legal oriented discussion.

Update:
The Web of Language weighs in on linguistic interpretation of Bong Hits 4 Jesus with some refreshing insight.

In addition to dismissing the very real presence of Jesus on the banner, Roberts dismisses the very real possibility that the banner's words might be nothing more than a meaningless stunt of the kind that is actively encouraged by television shows where audience members wear ridiculous get-ups and carry outrageous signs while waving frantically in order to catch the camera's eye.


Despite Roberts' noble attempts to read the banner's meaning, what supports the nonsense interpretation is the fact that the banner's words don't seem to have either a literal or a figurative meaning. Any way you slice it, "Bong hits 4 Jesus" is patent nonsense, like linguist Noam Chomsky's classic phrase, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," words which look like English but don’t mean like English, words which illustrate that language has other roles besides that of communicating.

That's particularly true when the source of the language is a teenage boy. Teenage boys tend to not really care that much about using language to communicate other then it's use to demonstrate who cool they are. They don't worry about interpretation of the message, they just want to call attention to the messenger. Maybe someday we can get Supreme Court Justices who spent some time in the past as teenage boys.