Federal Judiciary

It's Amy Coney Barrett

 Many of us here in South Florida were rooting for Barbara Lagoa.  Even though she didn't ultimately get the nomination, what an honor and an experience to have made the 2 person short-list. 

In the meantime, the left will have to decide how they want to play the Barrett nomination especially since it's pretty clear that she will be quickly confirmed.  

Like many other liberals, I?m devastated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg?s death, which opened the way for President Donald Trump to nominate a third Supreme Court justice in his first term. And I?m revolted by the hypocrisy of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?s willingness to confirm Trump?s nominee after refusing to even allow a vote on Judge Merrick Garland.

Yet these political judgments need to be distinguished from a separate question: what to think about Judge Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump has told associates he plans to nominate. And here I want to be extremely clear. Regardless of what you or I may think of the circumstances of this nomination, Barrett is highly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

I disagree with much of her judicial philosophy and expect to disagree with many, maybe even most of her future votes and opinions. Yet despite this disagreement, I know her to be a brilliant and conscientious lawyer who will analyze and decide cases in good faith, applying the jurisprudential principles to which she is committed. Those are the basic criteria for being a good justice. Barrett meets and exceeds them.

I got to know Barrett more than 20 years ago when we clerked at the Supreme Court during the 1998-99 term. Of the thirty-some clerks that year, all of whom had graduated at the top of their law school classes and done prestigious appellate clerkships before coming to work at the court, Barrett stood out. Measured subjectively and unscientifically by pure legal acumen, she was one of the two strongest lawyers. The other was Jenny Martinez, now dean of the Stanford Law School.

When assigned to work on an extremely complex, difficult case, especially one involving a hard-to-comprehend statutory scheme, I would first go to Barrett to explain it to me. Then I would go to Martinez to tell me what I should think about it.

Barrett, a textualist who was working for a textualist, Justice Antonin Scalia, had the ability to bring logic and order to disorder and complexity. You can?t be a good textualist without that, since textualism insists that the law can be understood without reference to legislative history or the aims and context of the statute.

Martinez had the special skill of connecting the tangle of complex strands to a sensible statutory purpose. She clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, who also believes in pragmatically engaging the question of what a statute is actually trying to do in order to interpret it.

In a world where merit counts, Barrett and Martinez would both be recognized as worthy of serving on the Supreme Court. If a Democratic president with the support of a Democratic Senate asked me to recommend a current law professor for the bench, Martinez would be on my short list.

There is no question that Barrett will move the Court far to the right, which is pretty depressing.  But at least she is extremely smart, qualified, and a nice person as described by all who know her.  Barrett gave a really nice acceptance speech and said all of the right things:

Full post as published by Southern District of Florida on September 27, 2020 (boomark / email).