Free Republic

A POLITICAL sidebar that made surprising news the last few weeks is a phrase in a 1985 job application from now-Judge Sam Alito questioning the Warren Court's reapportionment decisions. That tidbit sent shock waves through the political and pundit classes. It shouldn't have. Justice-to-be Alito's statement wasn't an attack on equality, voting rights, or protecting victims of racial discrimination. It was a simple observation that a liberal court created a doctrine that, however salutary, has significant problems. Americans have long embraced the ideal of equality from ''all men are created equal" forward. Equality did not mean identical political influence in...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 - It is the time of year when bedtime stories and television specials often recall the plucky reindeer and the little girl of Whoville who managed to save Christmas. This year, some conservative groups are hoping to add a new name to that pantheon of heroes: Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court nominee. "Liberal groups like People for the American Way and the A.C.L.U. have opposed public Christmas and Hanukkah displays and even fought to keep Christmas carols out of school," declares a radio commercial paid for by the conservative Committee for Justice beginning Monday...

WASHINGTON -- Henry J. Friendly, who died in 1986, was perhaps the most distinguished American judge never to serve on the Supreme Court, and he almost spared the nation the poisonous consequences of that court's 1973 truncation of democratic debate about abortion policy. The story of that missed blessing was told recently by Judge A. Raymond Randolph of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in an address to the Federalist Society. In 1970, Friendly, then on the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, was a member of a three-judge panel that heard the first abortion-rights case...

ALTHOUGH abortion rights have dominated the debate over the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court, there is another issue implicating the "culture of life" that has garnered fewer headlines: capital punishment. The impending executions of three men in California, including the lethal injection of reformed ex-gang leader Stanley Tookie Williams scheduled for Dec. 13, are a sober reminder of the irrevocable stakes in this area of law. Capital cases make up a substantial portion of the Supreme Court's docket each year. From 2000 to 2005, the court decided only three cases involving abortion but more...

U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito Jr. admitted he made a mistake in a 1991 opinion when he backed a Pennsylvania law that women needed permission from their husbands to get an abortion, he told U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe. Alito on Wednesday met privately with Snowe for an hour. Afterward, she said she would withhold judgment on his confirmation until after the Senate hearings in January. Alito told Snowe that his lone dissent on a 1991 abortion case mistakenly interpreted Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion on what constitutes an undue burden. He believed her support of parental notification could be...

The writer, of Omaha, is Nebraska's junior U.S. senator.During his confirmation hearings, John Roberts said that judges should judge each case on its own merits. They need to weigh matters, not approach their work as ideological automatons.Those words were recounted in a Oct. 28 World-Herald editorial that recommended U.S. senators keep Roberts' considerations "firmly in mind" as they consider the next nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court and fulfill their obligation in considering appointees.With one successful and one unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination behind us, the Senate now is considering the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to replace retiring Associate Justice...

In the same 1985 job application in which Samuel A. Alito Jr. said there is not a constitutional right to abortion, he made a statement that has startled many legal analysts: He said he disagreed with the Warren court decisions on reapportionment, which required that voters have equal representation. The reapportionment cases, heard by the court when Earl Warren was the chief justice, are among the court's most widely accepted decisions on civil rights and equal representation. Until the cases were decided in the early 1960s, many state legislators were elected by geographic area, rather than by population. The result...

Since Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement from the Supreme Court in July, members of the Democratic left have been itching to pummel a Republican nominee on abortion. Chief Justice John Roberts didn't fit the bill, since he had never made any controversial statements about Roe v. Wade -- or anything else for that matter. Judge Samuel Alito is a different matter, however. In a 1985 document released on Nov. 15, Alito told the Reagan administration that he would be proud to argue "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." This revelation produced gasps of outrage among Senate...

A curious e-mail is making the rounds from Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy's communications director, Stephanie Cutter, attacking Judge Alito's response last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee's request for more information about Judge Alito's involvement in a case in Vanguard mutual funds was a party in name only. In Monga v. Ottenberg, a bankruptcy receiver sought to have a party's IRA assets (which included funds in a Vanguard account) made available to pay the bankrupt party's creditors. Vanguard was a party to the case because the bankrupt party sued it to prevent it from releasing his IRA funds to his...

A brilliant appellate court judge, widely recognized for his legal scholarship, is nominated to fill the second vacancy on the United States Supreme Court. He is nominated by an anti-abortion Republican president, who pledged only to appoint conservative, “strict constructionist” judges, who would interpret—not legislate—from the bench. Rather than admit that they oppose him on ideological or philosophical grounds, special interest groups and liberal Democrats instead choose the low road. Lamenting that they had allowed the President’s nominee for chief justice to sail through a confirmation with little controversy, this time they have decided to engage in a smear campaign....

A coalition of liberal groups is preparing a multimillion-dollar television advertising campaign against the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. that seeks to move the debate over his selection beyond abortion rights and focus instead on subjects like police searches and employment discrimination, several leaders of the coalition said. The possibility that Judge Alito could vote to narrow abortion rights has dominated discussion among both supporters and opponents of his nomination. But Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice and one of the leaders of the coalition, said a poll commissioned by her organization showed the...

What would Samuel Alito's confirmation mean for First Amendment law? It's impossible to be sure, but his appeals court opinions give us some clues. A Justice Alito would likely take a pretty broad view of free speech protections; support religious exemptions from some generally applicable laws; uphold evenhanded benefit programs that include both religious and secular institutions; and uphold the use of religious symbolism by the government. • Free speech. Until the late 1980s, liberal Supreme Court justices generally supported broad free speech rights, and conservative justices usually took a narrower view. No longer. I've studied the votes in free...

As soon as the president names a new Supreme Court nominee, national firing squads swing into action. The Wild West was not as wild as today's zealots at either end of the political spectrum. Unlike more civilized conventional wars, no one is willing to "keep your powder dry" or "wait until you see the whites of their eyes." Instead, there is instantaneous opposition without a realistic opportunity to examine the nominee's record. Within a few hours, opponents of federal Judge Alito unleashed their attacks, with one distinguished professor warning, ". . . the confirmation of Samuel Alito carries a clear...

"I don't know what his personal views are, but I know that he has ruled on pro-life cases four times and he has ruled against pro-life positions three times. And the fourth was a split decision," said Richard Collier, president of the Legal Center for the Defense of Life, based in Morristown, N.J. "If you look at the paper trail, it is all negative." SNIP In one case, he voted with the majority to overturn a Pennsylvania law that would have required poor women seeking federally paid abortions after rape or incest to have first reported the crime to police....

Click here to read a letter from Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr., a Trustee Professor of Law at the University of PensylvaniaClick here to read a letter from Ronald D. Rotunda, a Professor of Law at George Mason University

After the debacle nominating his old personal lawyer Harriet Miers to the Court, President Bush has chosen Judge Samuel Alito, a leading light among conservative legal thinkers. The operative question now is: Will this be "Armageddon," as some political analysts claim, the most knock-down, drag-out, knee-to-the-groin, multi-million-dollar alley fight in modern confirmation politics? Or will it be peaceful, more decorous, like the hearings and vote for Chief Justice John Roberts? Liberals and Democrats have insisted that unless Bush's choice was soothingly squishy and moderate, there would be war. But that didn't happen with Roberts, and it might not happen with...

The recent announcement by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter that confirmation hearings on Judge Samuel Alito have been postponed until January was only the latest in a series of painful examples of what happens when Senate Republicans wimp out.Senator Specter did not wimp out. The Senate Republican "leadership" wimped out when they made him chairman of the Judiciary Committee after he had fired a shot across the bow of his own President, right after the election, publicly warning President Bush not to nominate anyone to the Supreme Court who would stir up controversy in the Senate.That was the time...

People for American Way Leads ‘Stop Alito’ A familiar liberal group has launched another campaign to "save the courts,” this time, from Supreme Court Nominee Sam Alito. People for the American Way began a targeted, national TV campaign Sunday during NBC’s "Meet The Press” with a commercial "to help tell all Americans that Samuel Alito is part of the radical right's dream team.” Sounds good so far. According to a fundraising e-mail received by NewsMax, the group views the Alito nomination as a critical step in regaining a mainstream – read: liberal – agenda for America. "We cannot let the...

WASHINGTON -- The abortion lobby faces an uphill battle to prevent a pro-life justice from replacing a pro-choice justice on the Supreme Court. That explains why abortion rights activist Kate Michelman cited her personal history to try to generate emotion against the nomination of Federal Appellate Judge Samuel Alito. The problem is that the example she cited is inappropriate and inapplicable.Michelman, longtime former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said Alito as a judge affirmed legislation that would have required her to notify a husband who had abandoned her of plans to get an abortion. That raised the prospect of women...

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. has addressed the Federalist Society multiple times during his long-running membership, and he stuck with dry legal humor during a speech in 1997. Delivered at the conservative society's national convention, the speech titled "The Crisis in the Legal Profession" focused on the gap between reality and the way criminal lawyers perceive themselves. The "gladiatorial image is wildly inaccurate," Judge Alito said, citing a national lawyers magazine, which said criminal lawyers see themselves as gladiators fighting the dragons of bureaucracy and the constabulary. "A more apt image of what actually occurs is two gladiators who march...