Legal News

The Next Justice Watch ? Wednesday?s Roundup

By Ashby Jones

We didn’t set out to do this, but we took a day off from the David Souter/The Next Justice story on Tuesday. So today, we’re all backlogged with stuff. Let’s get to it.

A Shortlister’s Secrets? Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Hannah Rosen write about the issue of marital status for the next justice. Write Lithwick and Rosen: “The list of potential replacements is overpopulated by women who are single, childless, or divorced. So America asks-or worries without overtly asking-what is this suspicious creature called the bachelorette, and what is she really up to?”

Women who have chosen hard-charging careers in the law are, they write, invariably viewed with suspicion, labeled (accurately or not) as lesbians, or derided as “having no life.” The conclusion Lithwick and Rosen reach is a provocative one: The “only women who can keep up with men are the ones who work very hard, and they are often divorced or unmarried and childless. Thus, as we ponder a list of potential Supreme Court nominees, it’s hardly a surprise that the current short list is dominated by such women. And so the list is a Catch-22: The choices a woman may make to achieve stunning legal success are the same ones that may also someday preclude her from a Supreme Court confirmation.

Ginsburg: We Need A Woman: The USA Today has a lengthy article today on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s strong sense that Souter’s replacement should be a woman. “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. I don’t say (the split) should be 50-50,” Ginsburg said. “It could be 60% men, 40% women, or the other way around. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.”

The USA Today reporter, Joan Biskupic, writes that since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s departure in 2006, oral arguments and the justices’ behind-the-scenes discussions on how disputes should be resolved have had a different tone. For instance, Ginsburg lamented some comments made during the recent argument over the strip-search of a 13 year-old girl.

“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she said, referring to her colleagues. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

More on Sotomayor: Last week, we blogged about Jeffery Rosen’s piece in the New Republic in which he quoted former clerks who were of the opinion that the Second Circuit judge isn’t that smart.

Now comes a backlash to the Sotomayor backlash, largely chronicled over at the Volokh Conspiracy (click here and here). For instance, Glenn Greenwald at Salon writes: “My perception of Sotomayor is almost the exact opposite of the picture painted by Rosen. I had a generally low opinion of the intellect of most judges — it’s one of the things I disliked most about the practice of law — but I found her to be extremely perceptive, smart, shrewd and intellectually insightful.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 06, 2009 (boomark / email).