Elizabeth Warren for the Supreme Court

seafan

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Wed Apr-21-10 08:52 PM
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Elizabeth Warren for the Supreme Court

To have this woman protecting the people's interests from the bench of the Supreme Court would be a godsend.

Elizabeth Warren
(Wong/Getty)

President Obama should nominate Elizabeth Warren to replace Justice Stevens. Warren is the Harvard law professor currently serving as chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel investigating the banking bailout. She has for years been one of the nation's foremost experts on bankruptcy, focusing on how it impacts working-class Americans. For years before the bubble burst, Warren warned us about the dangers of subprime mortgages. She has proved masterful at communicating this message to the public and to Washington. Her life story is an embodiment of what people can do when given the economic opportunities she has advocated in her writings. The daughter of a janitor, Warren did not attend elite private universities—she went to the University of Houston and Rutgers law school before eventually joining the Harvard faculty. The current Supreme Court has no justices with expertise in business matters, and has been pushing the law in a conservative direction in such cases. Warren adds that expertise as well as a progressive perspective. And for a White House that likes nominees it knows, it is important to note that the president met Warren years ago, and promoted many of Warren's ideas during his presidential campaign.

—David Fontana is a George Washington University law professor; Seth Grossman, who clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, is a lawyer at Jenner & Block LINK

Daniel Cluchey, a Harvard Law School student writes:

April 20, 2010

Meet Elizabeth Warren. The woman who has been single-handedly trying to save the middle class from financial ruin as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP and the chief apostle of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (coming soon to an administrative state near you) is also the best choice to take up the causes of justice that John Paul Stevens now leaves behind.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that in her capacity as the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Professor Warren was my teacher last semester. In the interest of even fuller disclosure, I should note that she is almost certainly the most intelligent person on the planet.

While it will be nearly impossible to replace Justice Stevens' moral authority on the Court in one fell swoop, his intellectual firepower, natural abilities as an impassioned leader of great minds, and persuasive skill in defense of America's most cherished legal ideals would echo in the career of a future Justice Warren. Her belief in the judicial firmament as a place that ought to serve the most vulnerable among us in equal measure to the most powerful has been evident in her work as a scholar and advocate, and her background and personality make her amply suited to lead the Court's liberal wing as they strive to protect ordinary Americans from the malignant specter of further deregulation and the narrowing of Constitutional liberties.

The most critical divide on the Court today is not manifested as Right versus Left, but rather as corporations versus people. The outcry that followed the recent Citizens United decision shed light on the growing rift between American consumers desperate for a fair shake and a Supreme Court that has moved speedily into the seediest corners of corporatism. In the coming years, the Court will likely face decisions that will further impact the relationship between this country's increasingly hamstrung Davids and its unfettered Goliaths, those corporate giants whose cups now runneth over thanks in no small part to the actions of the Roberts Court.

In Warren, those underserved by the court system would have a tireless advocate, a once-in-a-generation mind; not an umpire to call balls and strikes, but a hitter who could change the game. America deserves a Justice whose conception of the Constitution is not that it should protect the rights of companies at the expense of the rights of individuals; it deserves a Justice who will say so, and say so loudly. America deserves the great conversation, and a fighter to stand up for a progressive vision of law. Elizabeth Warren can be that Justice: a leader in the Stevens mold who can keep the young century's most important legal dialogues from becoming little more than an endless parade of Scalian soliloquies.

Tim Dickinson writes in the recent issue of Rolling Stone:

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If Warren has all the right enemies, she has also cultivated powerful friends. At the White House, she speaks directly to presidential wingman David Axelrod, and Obama himself has made the case for her agency on The Tonight Show. Warren strategized with Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, to steer the CFPA to passage in the House. "She has a great sense of how to operate politically," Frank says. And in the Senate, where debate on reform is just heating up, Majority Whip Dick Durbin calls Warren his "go-to person."

But Warren isn't taking any chances. "She's carried this fight way beyond Washington to the American people," says Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, who lauds Warren as a one-woman bulwark against the bank lobby. "So many of our politicians have failed us – and she has filled the gap."

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As a young law professor in Texas in the early 1980s, she embarked on a research project on bankruptcy expecting to "expose deadbeats – people who take advantage of a too-generous legal system." But the data and the case files told a much different story. Warren discovered that most Americans who file for bankruptcy are hardworking folks who play by the rules – and wind up losing, through no fault of their own. They get sick. Their marriages hit the rocks. Their parents need nursing care. "These are my people," she says. "That, for me, was transformative."

The lesson was reinforced a decade later when Citibank invited Warren to propose ways to minimize its losses from cardholders in financial trouble. Warren had simple advice: When borrowers show signs of distress – missed payments and plunging credit scores – cut them off from new lines of credit. But after she finished her presentation, a banker at the back of the room bluntly rejected her suggestion. "We have no interest in cutting back on our lending to these people," he told Warren. "They are the ones who provide most of our profits."

That moment, Warren says, "began to change my whole vision of consumer finance." She came to see Wall Street banks as predators, offering too-easy credit and too-complex contracts designed to "trick and trap" borrowers into recurring fees and exploding interest rates. "If people ended up in bankruptcy," she realized, "it didn't matter for the profit model."

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To make sense of what needs to happen, Warren distilled for Rolling Stone the three-part litmus test she uses to determine whether a proposed reform will actually protect consumers and ensure that we're rebuilding the economy on a solid foundation rather than erecting another house of cards. Think of them as Warren's Rules for Reform:

RULE ONE
Give the Little Guy a Fighting Chance

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RULE TWO
Make Bankers Pay For Their Mistakes

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RULE THREE
Stop Cooking The Books

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This is the caliber of dedication that we the people deserve from our leaders.

It is my sincere hope that Elizabeth Warren will, indeed, bring us another Warren Court.