In Praise of a Moderate Supreme Court
Matt Yglesias writes:
But as best I can tell, Barack Obama (and many other leading Democrats) don’t actually think that reviving old-school judicial liberalism would be a desirable outcome. That, rather than any political calculus, seems likely to me to drive a moderate pick.
That’s right, and it’s a good thing. We don’t need liberal activists on the Court anymore—we just need them in Congress! That wasn’t true from the 1930s through the 1970s, when progressive goals were more likely to be thwarted either by conservative judicial doctrines or by inaction in Congress. Now the jurisprudential vision of liberals should be much more about preserving established principles of deference to legislative judgment than about forging new rights.
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I would like to see a scholar. I know that’s probably out, but it’s better than a lawyer-politician, and I believe an academic would likely be better suited to intellectual debate than one of our great legal statesmen/women. What I think is needed at this point is for Obama to load the court with as many scholarly people as possible, and to resist the immediate need to balance the court. Anyway, that probably would help balance the court.