Skip to main content

Legal foundations

Stephen Bainbridge, on the Miers nomination:
Roe is a morally significant but jurisprudentially minor aspect of the broader problem that has preoccupied conservative legal thinkers for the last several decades. The really consequential questions go not to issues like the right to privacy, but to more fundamental institutional issues such as the respective roles of courts and legislatures. I've said it before, but it bears repeating, that Wickard v. Filburn matters a good deal more than Roe. Put another way, Roe is a symptom. In order to treat the underlying problem, a judge needs to know more than just whether she thinks abortion is good or bad. She needs a developed and thoroughly worked out constitutional philosophy. ... In short, even if Harriet Miers votes to overturn Roe, she could easily still turn out to be a disaster for conservatives if she fails consistently to adhere to the triad of originalism, textualism, and traditionalism that should properly constrain judicial decision making.
Bainbridge seems to be worried about Miers not seeing the forest for the trees, and I am beginning to fear it as well. Robert Bork weighs in on Miers and Bush here, giving voice to a lot of frustration with domestic policy. Both writings raise the issue of failing to sift an issue down to the nitty gritty and, as a result, winding up with something other than what was intended.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wordpress

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...

Da Vinci: It bleats, it leads

The trouble with The DaVinci code is certainly this : the fundamentals of the Christian creed can be summarized in a few sentences easily learned by schoolchildren and recited aloud from memory by the whole congregation on Sunday. They are great mysteries to be sure - Trinity, incarnation, redemption, salvation, crucifixion, resurrection - but they are simple enough to explain. Contrast that with the account Mr. Brown offers of a centuries-long fraud, sustained by shadowy groups, imperial politics, ruthless brutality and latterly revealed by a secret code "hidden" in one of the world's most famous paintings. The Christian Gospel offers a coherent, comprehensible account of reality that invites the assent of faith. It requires a choice with consequences. Mr. Brown's dissent from Christianity offers a bewildering and incredible amalgam of falsehoods and implausibilities, painting a picture of a world in which the unenlightened are subject to the manipulations of the fe...