Bookworm Room

This clip of today’s Sotomayor hearings may just have hit upon the most important constitutional question that faces us all as we confront our devolution into the Obamatopian State. In this segment, Senator Tom Coburn (R., OK) asks Judge Sotomayor whether she agrees that Americans have a basic right to self defense. The ensuing silence [...]

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You know that I don’t like judges.  I’ve certainly made no secret of that fact, and it’s no doubt a by-product of practicing law in a region crawling with activist judges.  Listening to Sotomayor struggle to articulate things — and to avoid her own footprint — in response to Sen. Lindsay Graham’s questioning is painful.  [...]

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The Washington Post is warning Republican senators not to be mean to poor Judge Sotomayor.  It’s a funny (inadvertently funny) article, because the Post editors acknowledge that Obama was anything but gracious when he was a Senator; then they explain why, even though he wasn’t gracious, he was right; and then they urge Republicans to [...]

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Something very weird is going on when a woman has worked 25 plus years as a lawyer (in both the private and public sector), but has only about $1,000 in savings, and less than $1,000,000 in equity. Financial records may show that (a) she gave everything to charity; (b) she gave everything to poor relatives; [...]

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Reviewing the facts and law is so passe.   The New Editor explains how it will be done in the Sotomayor era.

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Phyllis Chesler wrote a nice column today reminding conservatives (a) not to Bork Sotomayor (because two wrongs definitely don’t make a right); and (b) to make sure to develop Sotomayor’s understanding of the Constitution and her role as a judge — because, after all, that is what this whole job interview is about. Because of [...]

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Sotomayor’s statements about judges (better if they’re female and minority) and their role (to make policy) have been disturbing.  It’s worth nothing though that, as James Taranto points out that, on at least one occasion Sotomayor came out strongly in favor of free speech, even though it was very ugly speech: Sotomayor Plays Against Type [...]

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You can’t read a blog, attend a press conference, read a paper, or even think about Sotomayor without those 32 words popping into your head: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived [...]

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Are you wondering what an Obama court will look like?  You don’t need to look very far.  If you haven’t yet read Christina Hoff Sommers’ wonderful 1995 book, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, run out right now and get a copy. Generally speaking, the book is about the difference between equity feminists [...]

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The applause from Sotomayor on the Left is, you’ll pardon me for saying, canned.  They know Sotomayor is not a solid judicial candidate, so they’re focusing on the usual race and sex packaging.  The excitement isn’t there.  This is rote identity politics.  A good example is Ruth Marcus’s column applauding Obama’s choice, which I reproduce, [...]

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I keep seeing headlines all over the place to the effect that Republican Senators will be afraid to vote against the first proposed Hispanic justice.  This may certainly be true for Senators, who are a weaselly, unprincipled bunch, I suspect, though, that for many voters Obama himself is causing the bloom to depart the identity [...]

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Don Quixote and I had a very interesting conversation yesterday about the libertarian way to change societal evils. I don’t recall how the conversation wandered over to that topic, but it seems to me it started with a chance reference to a very well known incident in California in the late 1970s. Back then, a [...]

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I’m reading Citizens First National Bank of Princeton v. Cincinnati Ins. Company, 200 F.3d 1102 (7th Cir. 2000), and have concluded that Judge Terence T. Evans is one of the more delightful legal writers out there.  Although the suit is about insurance coverage, the underlying facts reveal Judge Evans narrative gifts.  He describes a little [...]

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Okay, I admit it.  I’m easy.  Call me “winsome” and write a thoughtful, well-informed, interesting article about the continuing resonance abortion has on the political process — even if it did not serve as the centerpiece of this last political campaign — and of course I’m going to link to the article.  In this case, [...]

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I’m sorry blogging has been so light today, but it’s been a go-go-go kind of day that’s left little time for anything but, well, going.  I did have a thought today, which I’ll share with you. Most lawyers I know have little that’s complimentary to say about the average trial court judge, a feeling that [...]

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A few months ago, the California Supreme Court overruled the will of the California voters and announced that gay marriage was a fundamental right.  The voters responded by changing the California Constitution to state that, in California, marriage is between one man and one woman.  As you know, if it were up to me, I’d [...]

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Back in 1989, Bay Area locals were stunned to learn of a horrific massacre up in Sonoma County: [Ramon] Salcido, now 47, used a gun and knife to murder his wife, Angela Richards Salcido, 24; their daughters, 4-year-old Sofia and 22-month-old Teresa; his mother-in-law, Marion Richards, 47; her daughters, 12-year-old Ruth and 8-year-old Maria; and [...]

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Just in time for July 4th, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment says what it means and means what it says. I personally am not now, nor have I ever been, a gun owner.  I keep meaning to go the local firing range and take lessons (operating on the principle that, since I’m [...]

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The alternative title for this post would have been:  You’re in prison, not a hotel.  From Best of the Web Today: He Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly Henry Boateng is an inmate in a Massachusetts State prison. He went to court arguing that his rights were being violated. Yesterday, a federal judge agreed: Boateng, who has [...]

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No, Obama has not spoken lovingly about mass murderer Che Guevara. However, another prominent Obama supporter has made the two equivalent in a very obvious way: he has displayed in his office side by side posters of Obama (that socialist, artsy-fartsy looking poster) and (who else?) Che. Check out this Webloggin post for a picture [...]

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I’ve been finding very disturbing the intense hostility that conservatives direct against John McCain. So much so that I wrote a very long rant on the subject, which American Thinker was kind enough to publish and which I reprint below: Perhaps because I’m a neocon, and not a dyed-in-the-wool, native-born conservative, I look at John [...]

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Marriage is not, and never has been, a personal right.  In Western society, it operates at two levels.  First, it functions at a religious level.  This is a deeply personal level, because in every religion, marriage is, or is equivalent to, a sacrament.  In America, you have the Constitutional right to be married in the [...]

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I went to law school in the days when students still took notes by hand. When I started practicing law, secretaries had computers at their desks, but no lawyers did. My first law firm used a “Wang” word processing system, which was really nothing more than a typewriter on the screen. The word processing department [...]

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Dennis Prager has a good column discussing what will be, in his view, the ramifications of the California Supreme Court decision creating a new right out of thin air.  One of the points he makes is that, in the future, to avoid charges of discrimination, homosexual relationships will have to be promoted equally with heterosexual [...]

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Cliff Thier talks about the far-reaching implications of the Court’s (and the government’s) “fundamental rights” language. The WSJ’s editors take on the election ramifications of the decision — a bit of unexpected, and undeserved, good luck for Republicans in a terribly managed campaign season. As was to be expected, National Review quickly put together a [...]

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