Yeah, his stretch of silence is extreme, but surely you can imagine a case in which the facts and law are sufficiently set out in the pleadings, that you have no unanswered questions at oral argument.
I wouldn’t hazard a guess at percentages, but I’d imagine there are a great many instances (a majority?) in which justices’ minds are pretty well made up before oral arg, and oral arg does nothing to change them. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that in only a small minority of cases does oral argument significantly change a justice’s position.
Agreed. I’m much more concerned that his wife is an activist and sometime lobbyist that headed a firm which boasted on its website about using her “connections” to help clients with “governmental affairs efforts.”
I’m sure it is totally coincidental that he always happens to agree with the legal positions his wife advocates and sometimes lobbys on behalf of.
One expects that any case that makes it to the Supreme Court is going to find itself with really good lawyers on both sides, and one also expects that really good lawyers will be ones who anticipate questions and include the answers without needing to be asked.
I would actually argue that judges were more activist in the SCOTUS of the 60s and 70s. I think liberal judges were more unapologetically willing to overturn precedent. Reagan’s election and appointments of actual conservative justices might have tempered the ardour of the judicial left for activism, given the dangers of an activist conservative court on the level of what went on in the heydey of liberal judicial activism. It’s actually politically good strategy for liberal justices to be strictly legal now and to sometimes even decry activism.
No, there is a “must.” And that “must” is thousands of legal scholars, like myself, who can look at a case and say, “yeah, okay, I can see that,” or “how the hell did they arrive at a bullshit conclusion like that?” And since most of us legal researchers are fully-licensed lawyers, we can call “bullshit,” and keep the SCOTUS in check.
How will y’all “keep the SCOTUS in check? By thinking really mean things? A sternly-worded missive that can be ignored? Not vote for them next election?
This is right wing pettifoggery and gaslighting. There is no difference in terms of “judicial activism” (which is a fictional notion in the first place). Decisions that the right dislikes are labeled “activist” and that’s all there is to it.
Same goes for “originalism.” There’s no principled distinction between left and right jurists in this respect. It’s just another fictional and malleable value that gets plastered on things conservatives like.
All of the activist conservative decisions have relied on a concrete part of the Constitution to justify them, whereas liberal activst judges have relied on much more vague ideas derived from other constitutional rights but applying only to the cases they want them to apply to.
Kinda curious about your favorite few examples, adaher. Along with a discussion about the importance of ruling in the spirit of the Constitution and justice rather than finding clever ways around it when it’s inconvenient, if you please.
It is impossible for the Constitution to explicitly forbid strict constructionism. If it did so, the explicit forbiddance would be strictly constructed, no? IOW you are relying on strict constructionism to deny strict constructionism.