Judge Gone Wild

He’s the judge who says parental rights end at the schoolhouse door and that the Pledge of Allegiance in public school classrooms is unconstitutional.

He admires an Israeli judge who’s outlawed spanking and radically expanded the power of the federal judiciary.

He considers an opinion he wrote in 1996 in favor of assisted suicide his greatest achievement.

He’s Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—the most infamous member of the most radical court in America. He’s notorious because he’s caused real harm—to parental rights, public safety and the reputation of the federal courts. But one of his colleagues says he’s a “mastodon,” soon to be “extinct.” President Bush could hasten that day by appointing more conservatives to vacancies on the 9th Circuit, but Reinhardt and his political allies aren’t quite ready to surrender. They’re intent on transforming America, with Reinhardt the master architect.

Reinhardt, whose courtroom is in Los Angeles, was immersed in Hollywood society as a child.

Before Reinhardt was 12, his mother, a screenwriter named Silvia, divorced his father and married a successful movie director named Gottfried Reinhardt, who produced Greta Garbo’s final movie. Young Stephen visited Hollywood movie sets and met glamorous stars who came to his home for dinner, including Marilyn Monroe. (According to one of Reinhardt’s ex-wives, Reinhardt is still a big fan of Monroe.)

His parents also taught Reinhardt about his Jewish heritage and Nazi persecution. His step-grandfather, Max Reinhardt, was one of several German artists who fled Hitler and immigrated to America. Once in the United States, Max gained renown for directing a stage production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” featuring James Cagney and Mickey Rooney.

Divorced parents, Hollywood friendships and tales of horrific violence that lacked the redemptive power of Christ’s atonement—Reinhardt’s childhood was the perfect recipe for the making of a leftist judicial activist.

“He thinks about his Jewish heritage heritage a lot, very much so,” Reinhardt’s ex-wife, Maureen Kindel, the founder and senior managing director of the Los Angeles public affairs firm, Rose & Kindel, told Citizen. “He also thinks about the discrimination against Jews that he suffered, of course, when he was younger. ... I’m sure that has formulated his views about being protective of people’s rights.”

And in his current position as a 9th Circuit judge, he has openly discussed his view that “social justice” and “individual rights” should serve as a “guiding principle of the judicial branch.”

Reinhardt himself credited his liberalism to early exposure to the Holocaust and discrimination. “It would be hard not to feel very strongly about fairness and justice after all that,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1986.

Problem is, those personal emotions seem to have skewed Reinhardt’s legal logic—especially on the court, where he has repeatedly exalted “individual rights” above other principles.

Reinhardt is not alone in that bias, said Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president and founder of Toward Tradition, a nonprofit that defends traditional, Judeo-Christian principles.

“Many American Jews have mistakenly embraced liberalism ... for instance, a majority of the leadership of the American Civil Liberties Union is Jewish,” he told Citizen. “They’ve gone all the way over to the compassion end” and neglected justice. Yet Talmudic writings specifically espouse the principle that “you should not make law as a consequence of experiences either sad or happy.”

When Jews forget their religious heritage and focus entirely on secular, individual-rights thinking, they open the door to societal chaos, Lapin said.

Reinhardt’s confirmation to the 9th Circuit in 1980 was not a smooth process. In fact, it was a “torturous” ordeal, according to Reinhardt’s ex-wife, Maureen Kindel, who told Citizen that law enforcement in Los Angeles launched a vigorous opposition to his court appointment—delaying it for at least a year.

Why? Because police officers had gotten an up-close view of Reinhardt’s version of “social justice” when he served as president of the Los Angeles Police Commission.

Just talk to Joe Gunn, a former LAPD commander during Reinhardt’s commission term. He told Citizen that Reinhardt had “open disrespect or disdain for the staff. … If somebody said something at a commission [meeting] that he didn’t agree with, he would just openly sneer.”

Another retired LAPD deputy chief, Dan Sullivan, said Reinhardt “saw us as a necessary evil.”

Several sources also told Citizen that Reinhardt was complicit in then—Mayor Tom Bradley’s decision to cut the budget for a community relations program in high-crime neighborhoods.

“We were all told [by police captains] that … [Reinhardt] didn’t want the police in the community getting too cozy” with the public, former LAPD assistant police chief Bob Vernon told Citizen. “We were pretty upset about that. We complained to the brass above us that this was a bad decision,” because “it was really a powerful program that reduced crime and brought the people close to the police.”

At the time, Vernon pointed out, he only had second-hand reports from captains about Reinhardt’s involvement. But those reports are also backed up by former Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon in his book Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. Cannon reveals that Bradley and Reinhardt wanted to retain control over Los Angeles politics. So they tried to prevent the police from building a power base by approving the elimination of the community-relations lieutenants—which ultimately contributed to further alienation of minorities from the police.

“The issues-oriented Reinhardt thought it a ‘very dangerous system’ because CROs [community-relations officers] might influence people to oppose court decisions restricting the power of the police,” wrote Cannon.

As the source of his information, Cannon credits an “interview with Stephen Reinhardt” in January 1994.

Reinhardt and his liberal allies also damaged the LAPD’s intelligence-gathering effort.

During the 1970s, radical anti-war terrorist groups were setting off bombs. And the LAPD tried to infiltrate some of those groups by attending left-wing political meetings where the terrorists would go to recruit new members.

The commission Reinhardt was on began limiting the amount of intelligence gathering the police could do. Meanwhile, under the leadership of Ramona Ripston (who would later become Reinhardt’s third and current wife), the ACLU launched its own attacks against the LAPD’s intelligence gathering from 1978 to 1984. By the time all was said and done, the ACLU and its plaintiffs received nearly $2 million from those lawsuits.

The cumulative effect was the disbandment of the LAPD’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division. “We lost our ability to gather intelligence, period,” said former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates.

Ironically, though, Gates said, it was that intelligence gathering that actually helped clear Reinhardt’s name during his 9th Circuit confirmation hearings. Reinhardt came under investigation because he “had relationships with several [labor union bosses] who were questionable,” Gates told Citizen. But police intelligence revealed that Reinhardt himself never actually committed a crime.

And Gates ended up defending Reinhardt’s record. “I used to joke with him about it,” Gates said. “I said, ‘We protected your civil rights by showing through our investigations that you have not done anything improper … you’ve just got stupid friends.”

Among Reinhardt’s other questionable friends were gays and lesbians who wanted the LAPD to cater to their community.

Ex-wife Maureen Kindel told Citizen that “gay rights” was another of Reinhardt’s legacies on the police commission.

Asked how that affected the LAPD, former chief Gates said that, from the time he was hired in 1978 when Reinhardt was on the commission and beyond, he was pressured to recruit homosexuals. “I wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘I don’t go recruit Baptists … or Catholics or heterosexuals; I go out and recruit people who I think can do the job, and I am not interested in their sexual proclivities.” (After Gates left, an ACLU-assisted lawsuit eventually forced the LAPD to recruit homosexuals at gay-rights events).

The commission Reinhardt served on also promoted women’s and minority-rights in a way that was often detrimental to the LAPD. “There were attempts at the time,” said former commander Gunn, “to lower the standards of people going into the [LAPD] academy in order to get more minority officers in the department.” It was “unfair” to minorities “who did go through the system and were good,” he said.

The ACLU also sought to make the LAPD more responsive to the concerns of feminists and special interest groups. It pressured the federal government to issue a mandate forcing the LAPD to collect data on the ethnicity of every single person they stop on the road, “also identifying information for the officers involved and the date and time of the stop, the reason for the stop, the circumstances of the stop,” bragged a press release.

One of Reinhardt’s former law clerks, Heather Mac Donald—an author who’s written on the politicizing of police departments (Are Cops Racist?, 2003)—said the data collection “greatly diminished the LAPD’s capacity to protect the city against crime. … [I]n a city where the police force has always been inadequate—to spend time in a completely useless task of collecting data on police behavior … I think it’s a great, great disservice to the people of Los Angeles.”

Reinhardt helped diminish the LAPD’s community presence and intelligence gathering, but he wants “a substantial increase in the size of the federal judiciary,” by which he means at least doubling it. It would only cost, after all, “slightly more than one stealth bomber”—a “drop in the bucket,” he wrote.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he esteems Aharon Barak, president of the Israeli Supreme Court. Under Barak’s leadership, the Israeli Supreme Court has usurped considerable authority from the executive and legislative branches of government and blurred the separation of powers, in which each branch serves as a check and balance on the others.

Professor Ruth Gavison, an internationally renowned constitutional scholar and founder of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, has referred to the court as “a self-perpetuating cult.” Unlike in the United States, where the president nominates and the Senate confirms, Israeli justices are selected by a committee of nine, one third of them fellow justices—led by Barak.

In 2000, the Barak court outlawed corporal punishment—spanking—of children by parents. The court declared that all corporal punishment is “completely unacceptable—a residue of a social-educational outlook that has become obsolete.”

Someone who knows Reinhardt quite well is fellow 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, who’s publicly referred to his colleague as a “mastodon,” “a disappearing breed” and the type of judge who will eventually, he hopes, be “extinct.” And yet, he also has a healthy professional respect, even admiration, for the 74-year-old judge.

“It’s sort of like watching a master at work,” he said. “You may not be a Picasso fan, but watching Picasso work would have been something itself, even if you didn’t appreciate his art. He’s [Reinhardt] very good at what we do—at law, at argument. And he’s a ferocious guy if you get into a tussle with him. He is ferocious.”

Kozinski told Citizen that he and Reinhardt differ over what to do when presented with a case for which there is no clear U.S. Supreme Court precedent. Kozinski said he tries to extrapolate how the Supreme Court would regard the matter, while Reinhardt opts for what he thinks the law “ought to be.”

“The judgments about the Constitution are value judgments,” Reinhardt said at a recent public speaking event (reported by the Los Angeles Jewish Journal). “You reach the answer that essentially your values tell you to reach.”

Reinhardt has helped give the 9th Circuit a unique distinction: the circuit court that’s been reversed more than any other by a unanimous vote of the U.S. Supreme Court. A study by Richard Posner, the chief judge of the 7th Circuit, found that the 9th Circuit’s frequency of unanimous reversals indicated a problem existed that couldn’t be explained away by the sheer size of the 9th Circuit or the number of cases it decided. Its waywardness reached its zenith in 1996, according to Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar, when it was reversed by the Supreme Court 24 times, 16 of them unanimously. Judge Reinhardt’s opinions accounted for 11 of those reversals, and five of the unanimous ones.

Reinhardt has not been quite as conspicuous in the last several years, although he was on two panels whose judgments were reversed during the 2004-05 term. The 9th Circuit’s unanimous reversals continue to stay high, totaling nine out of 14 for the 2004-2005 term.

Two cases that highlight Reinhardt’s extreme bent are his 1996 opinion on assisted-suicide, and his most recent parental-rights opinion involving school sex surveys.

In the 1996 case of Compassion in Dying v. Washington, terminally ill patients wanted doctors to hasten their deaths by administering lethal drugs, an illegal act under Washington law. Several court decisions later, Reinhardt and seven other 9th Circuit justices created what they hoped would be a new constitutional right to assisted suicide, in an opinion that Reinhardt called his “all-time favorite” (“20 questions for Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt,"; February 2004).

Reinhardt’s opinion makes reference to a Supreme Court case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which Justice Anthony Kennedy created “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Emboldened by Casey, Reinhardt swept aside the fact that no court had ever recognized assisted suicide as a right.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 reversed Reinhardt’s views by a 9-0 vote. Yet Reinhardt wasn’t dismayed; he predicted that physician-assisted suicide “will someday become the governing law in this country.”

More recently, Reinhardt was repudiated by the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 320-91 in November 2005 to condemn his ruling in Fields v. Palmdale School District, in which he said parents’ rights to protest a sex survey given to their first-, third- and fifth-graders were “substantially diminished” once they decide on a school for their children.

The 3rd Circuit faced a case with similar parental-rights issues (C.N. v. Ridgewood Bd. of Ed.) but a three-judge panel, including Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, rejected Reinhardt’s sweeping declarations on the limits of parental rights.

Reinhardt’s radicalism may be fueled by his bitterness, according to Sheldon Sloan, a governing board member for California’s state bar association who knew Reinhardt for many years—their sons even attended the same grammar school and were playmates.

“He was focused on climbing the ladder,” Sloan,who is also a former municipal judge, told Citizen. “I think during the Clinton administration that he really and truly believed he was going to get appointed to the Supreme Court. And I think he was terribly disappointed when he wasn’t.” As a result, “he turned even more activist. … He got much more public with his decisions.”

Reinhardt hasn’t exactly kept his frustration with former President Clinton a secret, publicly complaining that the president “blew it” by not appointing die-hard liberals like Reinhardt to the high court.

Nevertheless, Reinhardt found another outlet for political activism: his law clerks. The judge relishes his “mentor role,” said Kindel. “When I speak to him today, one of the things he mentions almost every time … is how wonderful his law clerks are and how he gets the best in the country. That part of being a judge is like the frosting on the cake to him.”

Reinhardt helped one of his law clerks, Mark Fabiani, for instance, get a high-level appointment in Mayor Bradley’s office, according to Kindel. From there, Fabiani skyrocketed into the Clinton administration. Clinton’s press secretary nicknamed Fabiani “my garbage man” because of his ability to handle the Whitewater and Travelgate scandals, according to Howard Kurtz, the author of Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine.

Then there’s Deval Patrick, who clerked for Reinhardt before becoming a U.S. assistant attorney general for Clinton. Patrick is in the running to become the next governor of Massachusetts and has explicitly endorsed same-sex marriage. “Patrick is eager to embrace the gay community for both votes and dollars,” said a local gay-rights publication.

Kozinski, Reinhardt’s rival on the 9th Circuit, is optimistic that the court’s radical bearing can be corrected, but he doesn’t believe the answer lies in a radical solution—like splitting the enormous circuit in half, as some in Congress are trying to do. That, he said, will only result in an even more radical court in the remaining part that contains California, from where all the judges would then have to come.

The answer for the 9th Circuit’s reversals, Kozinski said, is for President Bush to nominate and the Republican-controlled Senate to confirm four bona fide conservatives to fill four vacancies on the 9th Circuit Court.

“The more conservative our court becomes,” Kozinski said, “the more our views are likely to be in line with the Supreme Court.”

"Reinhardt is still a big fan of Monroe"

Always a bad sign.

Once in the United States, Max gained renown for directing a stage production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” featuring James Cagney and Mickey Rooney.

On a side note. Mickey Rooney and James Cagney were in a motion picture adaptation of "Midsummer's Night Dream " along with (I think) Dick Powell. Anyone interested in Shakespeare should track it down and obtain a copy -- it is really quite entertaining.

And the LAPD tried to infiltrate some of those groups by attending left-wing political meetings where the terrorists would go to recruit new members. The commission Reinhardt was on began limiting the amount of intelligence gathering the police could do.

Gates was right about the need for the LAPD intelligence unit -- this clown was wrong.

"Social Justice" is a joke. I attend Loyola University New Orleans, which has, for some reason, decided to start referring to itself as "Social Justice University." As economics professor Walter Block pointed out in the Maroon, people have a rather hard time defining "social justice," especially when asked to distinguish it from plain-vanilla "justice."

As for those who dare to define it, however, it invariably ends up looking like left-wing socialism, multiculturalism, and secularism.

While that is a political stance, of sorts, it is not a judicial philosophy. This Reinhardt fellow embodies all that is wrong with an activist judiciary. He sees his position as lord over the ignorant masses who are too stupid to elect legislators who conform to his vision of how the world should work, and believes that he must slap these peons down as a matter of right.

The more his power gets diluted, the better off we will be.

Reinhardt is married to Ramona Ripston, who has been executive director of the ACLU of Southern California since 1972, was a cofounder of NARAL in 1969, a leader in People for the American Way, and a longtime political associate and appointee of Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa. Ripston was responsible for forcing Los Angeles County to remove the tiny cross from its seal, and she led the initial court victory attempting to stop the 2003 recall of Governor Gray Davis based on a phony argument about voting machines (which the full Ninth Circuit reversed). Ripston is Reinhardt's third wife and he is her fifth husband.

The above paragraph appears on the Eagle Forum.

It appears just above the heading "PPRA Can Stop School Mischief", about half way down the page.

http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2005/dec05/psrdec05.html

As economics professor Walter Block pointed out in the Maroon, people have a rather hard time defining "social justice," especially when asked to distinguish it from plain-vanilla "justice."

Ihad to take 2 different types of social justice classes.

One teacher was a flaming leftist (except on abortion) with die hard marxist beliefs, while the 2nd social justice class, had a solid right wing conservative.

The classes were as different as literature and mathematics.

And your right, it isn't a judicial philosophy. Liberal social justice is marxism, unabashed, and unrefined.

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