Gawker is hoping that Kagan put the ball/strike metaphor to bed earlier today. But this also means that this allows me to link to this note from the Yale Law Journal —
The judge-umpire analogy has become “accepted as a kind of shorthand for judicial ‘best practices’” in describing the role of a Supreme Court Justice. However, the analogy suffers from three fundamental flaws. First, courts historically aimed the judge-umpire analogy at trial judges. Second, courts intended the judge-umpire analogy as an illustrative foil to be rejected because of the umpire’s passivity. Third, the analogy inaccurately describes the contemporary role of the modern Supreme Court Justice. Nevertheless, no workable substitute for the judge-umpire analogy has been advanced. This Essay proposes that the appropriate analog for a Justice of the Supreme Court is not an umpire, but the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
7:51 pm |
June 30 2010
Kagan’s nomination hearings begin tomorrow. We posted a link to three crucial pieces of writing and the RNC mailer that garnered an immediate reaction.
Here’s two quick things to add to your ‘knowledge queue’ as tomorrow’s events enter the ‘narrative stream’ —
1. Media Matters picks apart the worst anti-Kagan piece.
2. via SCOTUSBlog —
Coverage of the Elena Kagan nomination has reached a fever-pitch. The American Bar Association yesterday released its rating of Kagan: well qualified, by unanimous vote (one abstention). The Associated Press, Boston Globe, and Bloomberg have reports. Ed Whelan calls the rating “ridiculous” at Bench Memos, where he separately draws attention to “Kagan’s role, as a Clinton White House staffer, in preventing enactment of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.” At TIME, Adam Cohen briefly profiles the nominee, concluding that she could be “a powerful intellectual leader for the liberals, and adept at winning over conservative justices.”
9:56 pm |
June 27 2010
