I saw an interview with a state supreme court justice who was just like, "this shit is bananas, they are throwing out precedent, this is not acceptable" and I would like to see more of those voices elevated and encouraged.
Considering that every conservative on SCOTUS perjured themselves about Roe, I'm unable to give any of them any benefit of the doubt.
I can't even give any benefit of the doubt to anybody who is still giving them any benefit of the doubt.
It is outrageous imo. It feels a lot to me like part of the willful delusion here is order to protect the position of the upper legal academy’s position and vision of its own self.
It's not even an opinion to them, they think it's a categorical definition. Telling them a SCOTUS justice holds a partisan political belief is like telling them dogs are made of cotton candy
Is it that they fear losing credibility or social capital for attacking their peers, even though not calling out obvious faux pas is a great way to lose credibility
They never want to say, Hey, conservative judges, stop doing things that damage the legitimacy of courts.
What they do want to say is, Hey, citizens, stop noticing that conservative judges are damaging the legitimacy of the courts.
Lot of frauds outing themselves these days—this guy has shown he's an "expert in judicial ethics" in the same way Weinstein is an expert on feminism. One lesson: support "extreme" voices saying pack the Court now, etc.—turns out it's the mainstream of the legal profession that's full of extremists
not to harp on my own hobbyhorse but one big problem is that SCOTUS consists of people who are peers to those in the legal academy. would be better if at least a few justices were high-level politicians in a previous life. no illusions about who or what they are, then.
I think it's because they would be tacitly acknowledging a serious life blunder if they believed in something other than that fiction. I had law professors openly dismiss legal realism as a descriptive analysis. It's just coincidence that voting blocs line up along party lines, they imagine.
If they admit this isn't the case then they have to admit that the whole system that feeds them is corrupt. So they have to continue the charade to protect themselves
I was recently at Yale and made a comment about the travesty, corruption, and bad faith of the Supreme Court and one Law/Political Science super duper senior & famous scholar replied in their defense “I know these people! Do you know these people”? It was sad and scary and ridiculous.
Not just that scotus is full of good faith people, but that it's so impossible it could be otherwise that we are compelled to disregard any evidence in their behavior, statements, and decisions that would confirm otherwise. The core of this ethics is tautological goodness of a certain social class.
When I was in law school, the kids who made every bad-faith, devil's advocate argument in class were the ones who all joined FedSoc. They all acted incredulous that we didn't take their BS seriously
It's painful to see society-writ-large entertain it with a straight face
Honestly, I think you're overgeneralizing about the entire legal academy at 200+ law schools, based on a handful of people from the top 10 schools who get to pontificate on CNN a lot and write WaPo op-eds.
One of my favorite things about the 5-4 podcast is how it frames the history of the court as a long-term institutional conservative political project, which really helps make sense of its general trajectory even when they occasionally, reluctantly do something progressive
In my experience, this view holds increasingly less sway among younger professors and those outside a handful of elite schools. Just as NYU is not necessarily representative of US colleges generally NYU Law is not necessarily representative of legal academia.
do you think they actually believe what they espouse? i don’t know more than a few street level attorneys but don’t think much of courts at any level in private. but i think publicly it’s different out of fear of retribution from the courts…
It’s also striking that Gillers is relying on his own (perhaps willful) ignorance of the facts to opine about what a reasonable observer “who has all the facts” would conclude.
Obviously, that can’t be right. Covering up an ethics breach does not remove its stench.
