Weight of originalism

The Washington Times ^ | 10-27-05 | David Limbaugh

[JZelle]

Much of the body of constitutional law is a mess -- a convoluted mess. Contrary to so-called anti-elitist sentiment out there, it's going to take known heavyweights to clean up that mess. We've got them; why not use them? Unfortunately, some conservative observers of the Miers nomination have fallen into an anti-elitist trap. They correctly distrust over-intellectualizing -- or at least the snooty, pseudo-intellectualism that emanates from the academic left. They also have a well-placed aversion toward "over-lawyering," including the tendency to make the simple more complex. Thus, they instinctively react adversely to the argument that Miss Miers doesn't appear to have the optimum background to go toe-to-toe against some of the seasoned liberal justices on the Court, no matter how committed she says she is to the judicial philosophy of originalism.

[JZelle]

[Apogee]

>>...be intimately familiar with that law. It has the force of law -- unless overruled by the Court --

Only has the force of law to those not willing to ask for a second opinion. If once has the money, of course....

>> The constitutional law student's bible is not the Constitution; it is the body of cases that have interpreted it.

got to get that fixed.

[Daaave]

Judge Janice Rogers Brown

Born 1949 in Greenville, AL

Education:
California State University, B.A., 1974
University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, J.D., 1977
University of Virginia School of Law, LL.M., 2004

Professional Career:
Deputy legislative counsel, Legislative Counsel Bureau, State of California, 1977-1979
Deputy attorney general, Attorney General's Office, California Department of Justice, 1979-1987
Deputy secretary & general counsel, Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, State of California, 1987-1990
Private practice, California, 1990-1991
Legal affairs secretary, Governor Pete Wilson's Office, 1991-1994
Associate justice, California Court of Appeals for the Third District, 1994-1996
Associate justice, California Supreme Court, 1996-2005
Adjunct professor, University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, 1998-1999

More on Judge Brown:

Janice Rogers Brown From Wikipedia

[El Gato]

You left out the part that should make it extremely difficult for the liberal Democrats to oppose her.

She was born Janice Olivia Allen in Greenville, Ala., in 1949, five years before the Supreme Court struck down public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. After returning from service in World War II, her father grew cotton, corn and peanuts on a 158-acre (0.6 km²) plot he leased about 25 miles (40 km) away from Greenville, before reenlisting in the military, said Havard Richburg, a friend of the family. Her parents separated, and she was raised primarily by her grandmother, Beulah Allen, until her teenage years, when her mother, a nurse, took her to Sacramento, California. (Her mother remarried, adding the name Rogers.) Her family was involved in the voting rights movement in Alabama and became liberal Democrats. She was inspired to become a lawyer by the career of Fred D. Gray, the Alabama civil rights lawyer who represented Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Brown has said she initially shared her family's views, but over the years became more conservative in her thinking. In California, she made her way through Sacramento State University in part by working at the Department of Corrections, where she met her first husband, Alan Brown, an administrator there. Soon after the birth of their son, Mr. Brown died of cancer, leaving her to finish college and then law school at the University of California, Los Angeles as a single working mother.

You could call it Up From Poverty. Father WW-II vet, farmer (cotton and peanut farmer no less!) Parents divorced, raised mostly by Grandmother, husband died shortly after son born, worked her way through college and law school as a single Mom. Black. I guess not Black enough, or underprivileged enough for the likes of Jesse Jackson and the poverty pimps.