Posted on 09/03/2005 10:16:22 PM PDT by Cincinnatus
Back in the old days when I was a real judge, and not just the titled-for-life kind, whenever a Justice of the Supreme Court died or retired, I would invariably get an excited call from Mary advising that I just went up a notch in seniority.
You'd have to climb mighty high to be able to jump into and fill Bill Rehnquist's robe. I met him once, back in the late 70's when he gave the Robert Jackson lecture at Albany Law School (Rehnquist had clerked for Jackson, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, and a graduate of Albany Law, just like me). He seemed almost painfully shy, which surprised me. His talk was intelligent, coherent, precise. So were his judicial decisions.
More able people than I will write his epitaph. He earned his place in judicial heaven and made himself worthy of the real one with this dissent:
The Court's opinion decides that a State may impose virtually no restriction on the performance of abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy. I have difficulty in concluding, as the Court does, that the right of ``privacy'' is involved in this case. A transaction resulting in an operation such as this is not ``private'' in the ordinary usage of that word. Nor is the ``privacy'' that the Court finds here even a distant relative of the freedom from searches and seizures protected by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. ...The decision here to break pregnancy into three distinct terms and to outline the permissible restrictions the State may impose in each one, for example, partakes more of judicial legislation. ...Even today, when society's views on abortion are changing, the very existence of the debate is evidence that the ``right'' to an abortion is not so universally accepted as the appellant would have us believe.
-Roe v. Wade, 1973
God bless, Judge Rehnquist and his family and friends.
God bless a man who fought the good fight for the Constitution against great odds during his tenure!
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