Posted on 10/06/2005 7:15:47 PM PDT by jdhljc169
Today's Chronicle of Higher Education has a story that describes Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' involvement with a lecture series at her alma mater, SMU Law School. The inaugural lecturer? Gloria Steinem. I've played these games in law schools, and this story sends up red flags for me. Here's my take on it ...
I was reserving judgment, but after having read the Chronicle article (and given conservatives' skittishness about her already), I think she's a non-starter. Miers may be a very nice person - and by all accounts she is. But she has never served as a judge, and while I do not think that an attorney must have been a judge in order to be an excellent justice, I do think that if you want to be certain of a nominee's views on the proper role of the judiciary, you better have seen them in action as a judge.
We haven't. And absent that, we must look to other events in Miers' professional life to ascertain her perspective. To that end, the Chronicle article is instructive:
In the late 1990s, as a member of the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school, Ms. Miers pushed for the creation of an endowed lecture series in women's studies named for Louise B. Raggio, one of the first women to rise to prominence in the Texas legal community ...Ms. Miers, whom President Bush announced on Monday as his choice to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, not only advocated for the lecture series, but also gave money and solicited donations to help get it off the ground ... A feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, delivered the series's first lecture, in 1998. In the following two years, the speakers were Patricia S. Schroeder, the former Democratic congresswoman widely associated with women's causes, and Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Ann W. Richards, the Democrat whom George W. Bush unseated as governor of Texas in 1994, delivered the lecture in 2003.
Having served on the faculties of three law schools, I can tell you that if you are an academic of the conservative political persuasion, this is the way you play the game: you call things by the terms the liberal academic establishment uses ("Gender Studies," "Women's Studies," etc.) and then you bring in lecturers and provide content that challenges their prevailing "wisdom."
There must be dozens -- hundreds -- thousands -- of conservative female attorneys, politicians, pundits and successful business owners in this country who would be wonderful role models for female SMU law students. If Miers pushed for the creation of a lecture series to honor Texas' first and finest female attorneys, and the series brought in the likes of Steinem and Faludi, then I know as much as I need to know about this woman.
Stick a fork in her. She's done.
that would be 1979.....
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