DON'T YOU HATE IT WHEN THEY HAVE MINDS OF THEIR OWN?:

Judge Appears to Follow Own Conservative Path (Maura Dolan, June 7, 2005, LA Times)

During her college days, Janice Rogers Brown roamed campus as a single mother with her young son in tow, her hair in what some remembered as "the biggest 'fro there was" and her views so leftist that she later described them as almost Maoist.

Today, the California Supreme Court justice is President Bush's pick for a federal court that is considered a launching pad for the U.S. Supreme Court. Her conservative political views have so offended civil rights groups and Democrats that her nomination helped provoke an ugly confrontation in the Senate.

In her personal life, the 56-year-old Brown is private and soft-spoken, the least likely of the California justices to give media interviews.

But her court decisions and political views repeatedly have thrust her into the limelight, making her a target when Bush nominated her for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate opened debate on her nomination Monday, and is expected to vote to confirm her this week.

Brown, who has declined to be interviewed since her federal nomination, frequently is likened to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in her legal views and life story. They are both African American, politically conservative and from the South. But there are differences.

Whereas Thomas has been said to follow the lead of Justice Antonin Scalia, Brown appears to follow no one.

Former Gov. Pete Wilson named Brown, his onetime legal affairs secretary, to the court even though a state bar committee had twice rated her unqualified. The panel objected to Brown because, it said, she inserted her personal political views into court rulings and lacked judicial experience.

She had been a member of the state Court of Appeal in Sacramento for less than two years before moving to the state's highest court. Once there, Brown bruised the feelings of other justices by penning blistering dissents that belittled her more senior colleagues in ways they felt were personal.

In one decision, Brown defended electric "stun belts" for unruly criminal defendants in courtrooms. She zinged the majority ruling for restricting the jolt-releasing belts on the basis of research she said was so embarrassing that even a high school student would be expected to do better.

Despite a string of such withering dissents, legal scholars who closely follow the court eventually decided the state bar had been wrong about Brown. They praised her for a strong intellect, a lively writing style, independence and an impressive work ethic. Brown has been one of the top producers of opinions on the state high court.

She also has been less predictably conservative than expected. She occasionally rules for criminal defendants and chastises police for making what she views as illegal searches.

In one case, Brown objected to a ruling that permitted police to search bicyclists without identification. She said she did not know the race of the defendant in the case but suspected he was stopped because he did not look like he belonged in the neighborhood.

"That is the problem," she wrote. "And it matters." The cyclist was later identified as an African American.

Is there anyone in the legal community who thinks Thomas follows Scalia?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2005 12:00 AM