The Divider (Chief Justice John Roberts)

[marmar]

from The American Prospect:


The Divider

Despite his promises to do the opposite, under Chief Justice John Roberts the Supreme Court has become more divided than at any point in recent history. But is that such a bad thing?

Scott Lemieux | July 26, 2007 | web only


In a commencement speech he gave at Georgetown Law School last year, the newly confirmed Chief Justice John Roberts asserted that one of his primary goals was to create more unanimity on the Supreme Court: "Division should not be artificially suppressed, but the rule of law benefits from a broader agreement. The broader the agreement among the justices, the more likely it is a decision on the narrowest possible grounds."

After a truncated first term in which there were more unanimous opinions than usual, this seemed very possible to some observers of the Court. "Roberts," said the conservative law professor Douglas Kmiec, "has wisely set out to help his colleagues 'speak with one voice.' At mid-term, he seems to be succeeding, and that success, is a strong affirmance of the intended role for the federal judiciary under the Constitution." Nor was this sentiment limited to his most likely admirers. Several liberal law professors also thought that an increase in unanimity and a reduction in additional opinions was a distinct possibility; some even claimed that Roberts might move the court slightly to the left.

For these scholars, the second Roberts term must have been highly sobering. Not only did the new appointments, Roberts and Alito, turn out to be the doctrinaire conservatives everything about their records (as opposed to the vague banalities of their confirmation hearing rhetoric) suggested they would be, a far higher than usual number of cases were decided by a 5-4 margin. Nor were these 5-4 decisions particularly notable for a new dawn of collegiality. The most high-profile cases included Ruth Bader Ginsburg's angry dissection of Kennedy's poorly reasoned and nakedly sexist opinion for the Court in Gonzales v. Carhart and Stephen Breyer's lengthy dissent (supplemented by John Paul Stevens's briefer spray of acidic sarcasm) in the end-of-term decision striking down two local desegregation plans. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_divider