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Thread: Supreme Court of the United States

  1. #101
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    I'm hearing that Thomas or another one of the Judges may be about to retire. It wouldn't surprise me since he's indicated that he wants to retire. This may be wrong though. But it would make sense. From this article.

    Pure Speculation

    Two Supreme Court vacancies?

    Most of us can only handle so much drama in the news cycle in one day. But when CNN reported that both of the putative front-runners for Supreme Court would be in Washington tonight — Judges Thomas Hardiman and Neil Gorsuch — someone figured out a way to add a bit more.

    Another explanation for two judges en route to DC would be a surprise retirement...— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) January 31, 2017

    Mind you, I don't have any reason to think this is true. But it is quite strange that Trump would bring both judges in, as if we were going to have the nation vote by text on who would be nominated.

    http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tw...stom_click=rss
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  2. #102
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Trump Nominates Judge Neil Gorsuch to Supreme Court

    WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch on Tuesday evening to fill the seat on the U.S. Supreme Court left open by the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016.
    President George W. Bush appointed Gorsuch to the federal bench in 2006, after he worked in the Bush administration for two years as a deputy associate attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice. Gorsuch currently serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, New Mexico, and his native Colorado.

    Gorsuch is considered one of the most intellectual jurists on the federal bench, evinced by his gilded pedigree. He received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1988 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991. Later in his career, he earned a Ph.D. from Oxford University in 2004. He would be the first Supreme Court justice in decades to hold a doctoral degree.

    He’s had a picture-perfect legal career. He served as a law clerk for Judge David Sentelle on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, then clerked for both Justice Byron White and later Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court. He went on to a very successful career in the private sector before joining the Bush Justice Department in 2005.

    Gorsuch has embraced a textualist view of constitutional interpretation, including language that suggests he might share Justice Scalia’s view that judges should further construe the text only in a manner consistent with its original meaning. In Cordova v. City of Albuquerque (2016), he wrote:

    Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution. And that document isn’t some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams . . . but a carefully drafted text judges are charged with applying according to its original public meaning. If a party wishes to claim a constitutional right, it is incumbent on him to tell us where it lies, not to assume or stipulate with the other side that it must be in there someplace.

    That same year, Gorsuch authored a scholarly publication about judicial philosophy, in which he explained his view that

    an assiduous focus on text, structure, and history is essential to the proper exercise of the judicial function. That, yes, judges should be in the business of declaring what the law is using the traditional tools of interpretation, rather than pronouncing the law as they might wish it to be in light of their own political views, always with an eye on the outcome…

    He concluded: “Though the critics are loud and the temptations to join them may be many, mark me down too as a believer that the traditional account of the judicial role Justice Scalia defended will endure.”

    Gorsuch is known for a number of constitutional rulings that conservatives have applauded. He has consistently ruled in favor of religious liberty. In American Atheists v. Duncan (2010), he took the position that the Constitution’s Establishment Clause permits roadside memorials honoring fallen state troopers on public land. Regarding the free exercise of religion and federal statutes, he took the position that Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate violated Hobby Lobby’s rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a case that eventually became a landmark Supreme Court case.

    He has not been as outspoken on some other issues, such as the Second Amendment, but has nonetheless been generally supportive of gun rights when the matter has come before him.

    Judge Gorsuch was born in 1967 in Denver, Colorado. At age 49, he would be one of the youngest justices in decades, nearing Justice Elena Kagan’s age (50) when she was confirmed in 2010.

    Gorsuch has been married to his wife Marie for 20 years. They have two teenage daughters together.

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...supreme-court/

  3. #103
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    As a result of Justice Antonin Scalia's passing in 2016, is there a date appointed for Judge Neil Gorsuch to take office at the United States Supreme Court at Wasington, D.C.? His states would be Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas

  4. #104
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    March 20th is when they are supposed to start hearings. A vote may take place in late April or May.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #105
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    SCOTUS Turns Down Habeas Fast Track Case

    By Kent Scheidegger
    crimeandconsequences.com

    The U.S. Supreme Court today denied certiorari in the case that sought to block implementation of the "fast track" for the processing of federal habeas corpus petitions by state death-row inmates. See the docket for Habeas Corpus Research Center v. U.S. Dept. of Justice, No. 16-880. The Ninth Circuit threw the case out a year ago, holding that the District Court had no jurisdiction to issue the injunction that it did.

    The law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe has been representing the interests of murderers against those of victims and law-abiding people contra bono publico in this case as well as the Proposition 66 case. One can only wonder if America has completely run out of deserving poor people to represent pro bono, given how many blue chip firms are devoting their unpaid representation hours to the interests of people who thoroughly deserve the fate they are facing and who are in their present situation solely because they chose, as an act of free will, to take the life of an innocent person.

    In retrospect, though, Orrick did actually achieve something "for the public good." As a result of the delay they caused, the initial precedent-setting decisions in applications under Chapter 154 will be rendered by a Department of Justice headed by Jeff Sessions rather than Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch. In the long run, that may well be worth the delay.

    http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/...eas-fast-.html

  6. #106
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Gorsuch wins Senate panel endorsement, setting up floor showdown

    The Senate Judiciary Committee voted Monday along party lines to endorse Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, setting up a showdown between Democratic and Republican senators in a series of final votes expected later this week.

    The 20-member committee voted 11-9 for Gorsuch, President Trump’s pick for the high court seat left by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016.

    “The nominee’s opponents have tried to find a fault with him that will stick. And it just hasn’t worked,” said committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who allowed all 20 members to speak before the final vote. “Judge Gorsuch is eminently qualified. He’s a mainstream judge who’s earned the universal respect of his colleagues on the bench and in the bar. He applies the law as we in Congress write it.”

    Despite such praise from the GOP side, all Democrats on the committee voted against the nominee, in a sign of the clash to come as the nomination advances to the full Senate.

    The chamber’s Democratic leaders appear ready to try to hold up the nomination through what's known as a filibuster. Republicans have 52 senators and would need the support of eight Democrats to reach the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster and head to a final vote.

    That appears out of reach. Prior to the committee vote, more than 40 Democrats said they were willing to block the Gorsuch nomination -- increasing the likelihood that majority Republicans would use the so-called "nuclear option" to push the nomination through.

    California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s top Democrat, returned to her party’s repeated argument that Judge Merrick Garland, former-President Barack Obama’s nominee, should have been considered for the Scalia seat, but leaders of the Republican-controlled Senate held off until after the 2016 presidential election.

    Feinstein also revisited a ruling Gorsuch made on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Colorado, in which he sided with a company that fired a trucker for disobeying orders by unhitching his vehicle from a malfunctioning tractor-trailer and driving off -- after waiting hours for help in sub-zero temperatures.

    “So this is not the usual nominee,” she said. “Therefore, I cannot support the nominee.”

    So far, just three Senate Democrats have announced support for Gorsuch, a graduate of Columbia University, Harvard Law and Oxford University.

    They are Sens. Joe Donnelly, of Indiana; Heidi Heitkamp, of North Dakota; and Joe Manchin of West Virginia -- all representing states Trump won in November and all up for re-election next year.

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday that Gorsuch nevertheless will be confirmed by Friday.

    He was noncommittal on whether he was prepared to trigger to so-called "nuclear option," a change in precedent that would allow the Senate to break the filibuster with a simple majority of 51 votes.

    But on Monday, a Republican colleague spoke bluntly and indicated the party would go that route. South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Judiciary committee member, said: “This will be the last person subject to a filibuster. … Ironically, we are going to change the rules … for somebody who has been a good judge over such a long time.”

    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., predicted Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Gorsuch would not pass the 60-vote benchmark and argued that Trump should "try to come up with a mainstream nominee."

    Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat on the committee, like Feinstein argued that Gorsuch had too often sided against the “little guy.”

    “In case after case, he favored corporations, lawyers and the special interest elite … over workers, consumers, people of disability and victims of discrimination,” he said.

    Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican on the committee, said Gorsuch likely thought the firing of the trucker was “foolish.”

    “But that wasn’t the question before him,” Lee said. “The law, as he carefully analyzed it, would not allow judicial intervention.”

    https://www.google.com/amp/www.foxne...wdown.amp.html
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  7. #107
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Senate Confirms Gorsuch as Supreme Court Justice

    WASHINGTON — Judge Neil M. Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate on Friday to become the 113th justice of the Supreme Court, capping a political brawl that lasted for more than a year and tested constitutional norms inside the Capitol’s fraying upper chamber.

    The development was a signal triumph for President Trump, whose campaign last year rested in large part on his pledge to appoint another committed conservative to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. However rocky the first months of his administration may have been, Mr. Trump now has a lasting legacy: Judge Gorsuch, 49, could serve on the court for 30 years or more.

    Vice President Mike Pence presided over the final vote Friday, a show of force for the White House on a day when his tie-breaking vote as president of the Senate was not necessary. The final tally was 54-45 in favor of confirmation.

    The confirmation was also a vindication of the bare-knuckled strategy of Senate Republicans, who refused even to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Judge Merrick B. Garland, saying the choice of the next justice should belong to the next president.

    Yet the bruising confrontation has left the Senate a changed place. Friday’s vote was only possible after the Senate discarded longstanding rules meant to ensure mature deliberation and bipartisan cooperationin considering Supreme Court nominees. On Thursday, after Democrats waged a filibuster against Judge Gorsuch, denying him the 60 votes required to advance to a final vote, Republicans invoked the so-called nuclear option: lowering the threshold on Supreme Court nominations to a simple majority vote.

    The confirmation saga did not help the reputation of the Supreme Court, either. The justices say politics plays no role in their work, but the public heard an unrelentingly different story over the last year, with politicians, pundits and well-financed outside groups insisting that a Democratic nominee would rule differently from a Republican one.

    Judge Gorsuch possesses the credentials typical of the modern Supreme Court justice. He is a graduate of Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, served as a Supreme Court law clerk and worked as a lawyer at a prestigious Washington law firm and at the Justice Department. He joined the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, in 2006, where he was widely admired as a fine judicial stylist.

    During 20 hours of questioning from senators during his confirmation hearings last month, Judge Gorsuch said almost nothing of substance. He presented himself as a folksy servant of neutral legal principles, and senators had little success in eliciting anything but canned answers.

    But neither side harbored any doubts, based on the judge’s opinions, other writings and the president who nominated him, that Judge Gorsuch would be a reliable conservative committed to following the original understanding of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution.

    A week from Monday, Justice Gorsuch will put on his robes, follow the court’s custom of shaking hands with each of his colleagues and ascend to the Supreme Court bench to hear his first arguments. A ninth chair, absent since the spring of 2016, will be waiting for him.

    He is not a stranger to the court, having served as a law clerk in 1993 and 1994 to Justice Byron R. White, who died in 2002, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who continues to hold the crucial vote in many closely divided cases.

    Justice Gorsuch will be the first former Supreme Court clerk to serve alongside a former boss. And he may recall Justice White’s observation about how transformative a new addition to the bench can be. “Every time a new justice comes to the Supreme Court,” Justice White liked to say, “it’s a different court.”

    The court has been short-handed since Justice Scalia’s death on Feb. 13, 2016. Within hours, the Republican majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said the seat would not be filled until a new administration came to power.

    It was perhaps the most audacious escalation in a series of precedent-busting Senate skirmishes in recent decades — tracing from Democratic opposition to Judge Robert H. Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas to the wide-scale use of the filibuster by Republicans under Mr. Obama. Republicans have pinned blame squarely on their opponents, citing Democratic blockades of judicial nominees under President George W. Bush and a rule change in 2013, when Democrats controlled the Senate, barring the filibuster for lower judgeships and executive branch nominees.

    But by design, that move left the Supreme Court filibuster untouched. Democrats have insisted that history remember who toppled this final emblem of minority party influence over confirmations.

    “They have had other choices,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said of Republicans, after arguing for weeks that the nomination should be withdrawn if Judge Gorsuch could not earn 60 votes. “They have chosen this one.”

    Over the last year, the eight-justice court has deadlocked a few times, but it has employed all kinds of strategies to avoid being completely hobbled. The justices have ducked some cases, issued vanishingly narrow decisions in others and slow-walked still others, waiting for a ninth justice to resolve what would otherwise be a 4-4 tie.

    On his third day on the bench, Justice Gorsuch will hear what may be the most important case of the term, a church-state clash with accessible facts and vast implications. On the Federal Court of Appeals in Denver, Judge Gorsuch was receptive to claims based on religious freedom, and he may make an early mark at the Supreme Court in that same area.

    There is good reason to think he may cast the decisive vote in the case, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, No. 15-577. The court has signaled that it feared a deadlock, taking an extraordinarily long time to schedule arguments.

    The justices agreed to hear the case in January 2016, when Justice Scalia was still alive. Indeed, he may have cast the fourth vote required to place the case on the court’s docket.

    Other cases the court agreed to hear that day were argued and decided by the end of the last term, in June. But the court put the religion case on a very slow track, scheduling it for argument in the waning days of the current term.

    https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/0...ww.google.com/
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  8. #108
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    The SCOTUS Lineup on the Death Penalty

    By Bill Otis
    crimeandconsequences.com

    The Supreme Court today announced a unanimous per curiam opinion in Dunn v. Madison. I'll repeat the Heritage Foundation's summary of the case:

    [T]he Court reversed a decision of the Eleventh Circuit in an Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) case. AEDPA provides that a state prisoner is entitled to federal habeas relief only if the state trial court's adjudication of the prisoner's claim "was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law." In this case, an Alabama trial court sentenced Vernon Madison to death for murdering a police officer. Awaiting execution, Madison suffered several strokes and petitioned for habeas, asserting that he had become incompetent to be executed. Experts testified that although Madison could not remember the "sequence of events from the offense to his arrest to the trial or any of those details," he did understand he was "tried and imprisoned for murder and that Alabama will put him to death as punishment for that crime." The district court denied Madison's petition but the Eleventh Circuit reversed. Today, the Supreme Court reversed, holding that no Supreme Court precedent has "'clearly established' that a prisoner is incompetent to be executed because of a failure to remember his commission of the crime, as distinct from a failure to rationally comprehend the concepts of crime and punishment as applied in his case."

    Ginsburg, joined by Breyer and Sotomayor concurred, writing that while AEDPA precludes consideration of the question in this case, the question of "whether a State may administer the death penalty to a person whose disability leaves him without memory of him commission of a capital offense" "warrant[s] full airing." Breyer also concurred, writing separately to (once again) call into question the "unconscionably long periods of time that prisoners often spend on death row awaiting execution."

    Perhaps the more interesting topic here is trying to read the tea leaves on the current Supreme Court lineup on the death penalty. Up to now, it's been reasonably clear that there are four votes in favor (Roberts, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch) and two against (Ginsburg and Breyer) (in my first edition, I mistakenly said Ginsburg and Kennedy. I thank Doug Berman for his catching this). There has been some doubt about the other three. I now want to hazard my guess.

    Although Justice Sotomayor very conspicuously did not join Justice Breyer's "unconstitutional-in-all-circumstances" Glossip dissent, her views since then seem to me to signal that she will do so in the near future. Both her language and, so to speak, her body language, tell me she's going to "evolve."

    Justice Kennedy is a different matter entirely. There was ample reason to suspect, given his language in Kennedy v. Louisiana and Roper v. Simmons, that, a few years ago, he was moving in an abolitionist direction. The fact that he did not write separately in Glossip, and fully joined Justice Alito's opinion for the Court holding point-blank that "the death penalty is constitutional" was, I thought, the single most important thing about that case. His silence today is another good sign. I now think it extremely unlikely that Justice Kennedy would vote to outlaw capital punishment, or even adopt any further restraints on its application.

    I'm not sure of the reasons for what I believe to be Justice Kennedy's firming up on this subject, but they might include (1) that the death penalty is inflicted less frequently now, (2) the existence of some high-profile cases like the Boston Marathon bomber and the Charleston church mass killer, where blanket opposition to the death penalty is difficult for a person with a normal conscience to maintain, and (3) Justice Kennedy's respect for precedent, which is not ambiguous on this subject.

    This leaves Justice Kagan. Her refusal to join today's concurrence pushes me to believe what I've been thinking for some time, to wit, that Justice Kagan will not vote to outlaw the death penalty in all circumstances.

    Justice Kagan said at her confirmation hearing that she regarded capital punishment as "settled law going forward." Her actions since they tell me that she is, as I always thought, a person of her word. It's also very encouraging to see that Justice Kagan draws a sharp line between her personal policy views (which I suspect disapprove the death penalty) and her role as a jurist to follow the law.

    Accordingly, I think the current lineup against abolition is 6-3. Of course it's possible that some of the older Justices (Ginsburg, Kennedy and Breyer) may leave the Court in the next two or three years. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, inconceivable that President Trump would name a justice opposed to the Court's current view as set forth in Glossip.

    http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/...eath.html#more

  9. #109
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Justice Ginsburg, nearing 85, signals she won't retire soon

    By MARK SHERMAN and JESSICA GRESKO
    The Associated Press

    WASHINGTON — In different circumstances, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might be on a valedictory tour in her final months on the Supreme Court. But in the era of Donald Trump, the 84-year-old Ginsburg is packing her schedule and sending signals she intends to keep her seat on the bench for years.

    The eldest Supreme Court justice has produced two of the court's four signed opinions so far this term. Outside of court, she's the subject of a new documentary that includes video of her working out. And she's hired law clerks to take her through June 2020, just four months before the next presidential election.

    Soaking in her late-in-life emergence as a liberal icon, she's using the court's monthlong break to embark on a speaking tour that is taking her from the Sundance Film Festival in Utah to law schools and synagogues on the East Coast. One talk will have her in Rhode Island on Tuesday, meaning she won't attend the president's State of the Union speech that night in Washington.

    She has a standard response for interviewers who ask how long she intends to serve. She will stay as long as she can go "full steam," she says, and she sees as her model John Paul Stevens, who stepped down as a justice in 2010 at age 90.

    "I think that Justice Ginsburg has made clear that she has no intention of retiring. I am sure she wants to stay on the court until the end of the Trump presidency if she can," said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and a liberal who called on Ginsburg to retire in 2014, when Barack Obama was president and Democrats controlled the Senate.

    But Chemerinsky noted "no one can know whether she will be on the court on Jan. 20, 2021, if Trump serves one term, let alone Jan. 20, 2025, if he is re-elected."

    Ginsburg doesn't talk about Trump in public anymore, not since she criticized him in interviews with The Associated Press and other media outlets before the 2016 election. The comments prompted Trump to tweet that "Her mind is shot - resign!" She later apologized.

    Ginsburg, who declined to comment for this story, this year marks the 25th anniversary of her nomination by President Bill Clinton and her confirmation as the second woman on the court.

    As Ginsburg and most Americans anticipated Hillary Clinton's election in 2016, she didn't commit to retiring but suggested she would give the first female president the chance to replace "a flaming feminist litigator," as Ginsburg has wryly described herself.

    When her husband, Martin Ginsburg, died in 2010, Ginsburg said she did not think much about stepping down. If anything, since Stevens' retirement, she has become more outspoken and visible as the leader of the court's liberal wing.

    Two childhood friends from Brooklyn, New York, who retired two decades ago say "Kiki," the nickname they still use for Ginsburg, has kept the same busy schedule for years.

    "I don't think she's slowing down. That's for sure," said Ann Kittner, a friend since their days at James Madison High School. Harryette Helsel, who has known Ginsburg since kindergarten, said she's joked with Ginsburg: "We're retired. Why are you working so hard?" They both laughed.

    Helsel pointed to Ginsburg's workout routine, which has been in the spotlight in recent years. Ginsburg started working out with a trainer in 1999 after being treated for colorectal cancer. She does an hour twice a week.

    A book on the workout by her trainer, with a forward by Ginsburg, came out last year. "RBG," a documentary about the justice that premiered at Sundance, includes video of her doing pushups and throwing a weighted ball, among other exercises. While pulling on a resistance band, she tells her trainer: "This is light."

    That video may surprise visitors to the court, who can be struck by how slowly Ginsburg moves, her head often bowed, when the court session ends for the day and justices leave the bench in full view of the audience. Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan have taken to waiting until Ginsburg exits because she otherwise would be left by herself as she makes her way to the justices' robing room.

    But she has walked at a deliberate pace for years. Once, after remaining seated well after the other justices had departed, she explained that she had accidentally kicked off a shoe during the arguments and couldn't locate it with her feet.

    Ginsburg usually grips a handrail to go down the few steps from the bench in the courtroom. But there was no railing for her to grab on a November day when she followed a director's instructions through several takes and climbed the steps in front of the courthouse for a scene in "On the Basis of Sex," a movie about Ginsburg's rise in the legal profession that is due out this year.

    Ginsburg's friend Ann Claire Williams, a newly retired federal appeals court judge, said sometimes people get the wrong idea from Ginsburg's small stature and think she is frail.

    "She is so spry," said Williams, adding that Ginsburg's mind is also sharp, and her recall on cases "extraordinary."

    Trump remarked during the campaign that he might get to name four justices while president. But conservatives hoping to lock in a majority on the court during Trump's presidency would be happy for now with just one more vacancy. They are focused not on Ginsburg, but on the prospect that Justice Anthony Kennedy might retire this year. Kennedy, too, has hired law clerks for next term, a possible hint he plans on staying. The Above the Law blog first reported on Ginsburg's and Kennedy's clerk hirings.

    Ginsburg's decision to stay on past Obama's time in the White House upset progressives because they feared — and conservatives now hope — a more conservative justice might replace her.

    "The assumption was she can't go 'til she's 87, but maybe she will," said Curt Levey, president of the conservative Committee for Justice.

    She has been counted out before, wrongly.

    When Ginsburg had a second cancer surgery, for pancreatic cancer in 2009, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., inelegantly forecast that she would die within a year. He later apologized.

    In a speech just over a year later, Ginsburg said, "I am pleased to report that, contrary to Sen. Bunning's prediction, I am alive and in good health."

    Bunning died last year.

    http://www.startribune.com/justice-g...oon/471421394/

  10. #110
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Sonia Sotomayor praises Clarence Thomas: 'I just love the man as a person'

    By Melissa Quinn
    The Washington Examiner

    Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor praised fellow Justice Clarence Thomas during a speech Tuesday, and said that while they may disagree ideologically, “I just love the man as a person.”

    Sotomayor spoke to students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and said the justices have mutual respect for one another, according to reports.

    She cited Thomas as the colleague “with whom I probably disagree the most,” but spoke highly of his character.

    He knows the name of every single employee in the building,” Sotomayor told students, according to reports. “I can stand here and say I just love the man as a person. He has the same value toward human beings as I have, despite our differences."

    Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court by former President Barack Obama in 2009. Thomas was nominated to the court by former President George H.W. Bush in 1991.

    Sotomayor, a liberal, and Thomas, a conservative, are ideological opposites. But the justices frequently speak of the collegiality of the Supreme Court, despite the differing views.

    Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously shared a close friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and Ginsburg said in February the Supreme Court is the "most collegial" place she'd ever worked.

    During her appearance at Vanderbilt University, Sotomayor also spoke to the gravity of her role on the Supreme Court and said the nine justices are “equally passionate about the Constitution and the law.”

    “With every case in which we rule, there’s a winner and a loser. I bear that in mind with every decision,” she said. "There’s never a question of doing the least harm. It’s almost inevitable we will cause harm to someone.”

    The Supreme Court is currently on a two-week recess. The justices will reconvene April 13 and hear cases this month challenging President Trump’s travel ban and redistricting in Texas, among others.

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...an-as-a-person

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