June 8, 2017
AND JUDGES WERE LAWYERS...:
What the Judges Know About Trump (Linda Greenhouse, JUNE 8, 2017, NY Times)
[Watts v. State of Indiana] lives on for a single line in Justice Felix Frankfurter's opinion for the court. "There comes a point," Frankfurter wrote, "where this court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men."For weeks this spring, that line rattled around in my mind. I had never read the Watts opinion until the other day, when I finally traced the line to its source. But I'd read several recent judicial opinions for which the line is highly pertinent, even revelatory. The most recent was Chief Judge Roger Gregory's majority opinion for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit two weeks ago, upholding a nationwide injunction against President Trump's Muslim travel ban.The president's executive order "in text speaks with vague words of national security," Judge Gregory wrote, "but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination." Drawing on candidate Donald Trump's professed goal of keeping Muslims out of the country, the judge observed that the order "cannot be divorced from the cohesive narrative linking it to the animus that inspired it."What we know as men.
Nevermind his determination to antagonize judges; his reputation among lawyers generally is unimaginably low, as witness the quote the other day in the story about how no one wants to take his case: "The guy won't pay and he won't listen." Lawyers don't mind representing scum, but they do mind not getting paid.
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 8, 2017 5:35 AM