Interesting quote from Captain Blood

My kids and I have been watching the 1935 movie Captain Blood, which was on TCM a few days ago.  It’s a wonderful swashbuckler of a movie, based on Rafael Sabatini’s book of the same name.  Captain Blood follows the adventures of an apolitical Irish doctor who falls afoul of the Bloody Assizes when he treats a wounded rebel following the 1685 Monmouth revolution against England’s King James II.  He ends up being sent to the colonies as a slave, where his real adventures, exciting and romantic, begin.

When first arrested, Blood’s trial takes place in the kangaroo court over which the infamous (and real) Lord Jeffreys presided.  When it came to the Blood Assizes, Jeffreys’ philosophy was that all who stood before him were guilty and could not be proven innocent. He sentenced them to death wholesale.

In the movie, when faced with the manifest injustice Jeffreys was doling out, Blood can’t keep quiet:  “What a creature must sit on the throne who lets a man like you deal out his justice.” I was much struck by that line, which goes to a core point about judges and justice:  with few exceptions, they reflect the beliefs of those who appoint them.

Given that judges reflect that powers that appoint them, it’s noteworthy that Justices Robertson and Alito are men of such integrity and intellect.  And it tells us much about Obama that the name most bandied about as his proposed Supreme Court appointment is Sonia Sotomayor, a woman whose pronouncements on and about the law indicate that she’s seldom met a white man she thought worthy.