The University of Chicago Law School's Professor Eric Posner (son of Judge Richard Posner) has blogged a brief "
Supreme Court 2013: Year in Review." Some of the highlights include:
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* Kennedy is a libertarian. Meaning that he’s (somewhat) liberal on social issues and occasionally skeptical of the executive, and conservative on everything else. He almost certainly thinks that striking down UT’s affirmative action program and striking down DOMA are warranted by the same legal principles, and believes that those who celebrated him Wednesday (for gay marriage) and vilified him Monday (for affirmative action) are hypocrites. In opinion after opinion, he tries but fails to explain how he derives his libertarian holdings from the Constitution. His DOMA opinion is the opinion that dare not speak its name.
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* The three most liberal justices—Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan—vote nearly in lockstep. Their opinions tend to be most defensible in terms of the normal standards of legal reasoning, in comparison with the opinions of the other justices. But that’s because they are fighting a rearguard action, trying to preserve some liberal precedents, unlike the conservatives, who seek to change the law. And they will happily hop onto a Kennedy opinion that rockets into the stratosphere.
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And my personal favorite...
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* Justice Thomas has integrity, but it’s the integrity of a madman. He is the Ron Paul of the Supreme Court.
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The bottom line of the review appears to be the begrudging acknowledgement of the extreme judicial activism of the Conservatives on the court... in ironic contra-position to most conservative's feigned dislike of judicial activism.
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* The conservative justices really are very, very conservative. I had up until now pooh-poohed liberal constitutional law professors and journalists who argued that the court had gone off the rails. Mea culpa.
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Apology accepted, Eric. Too bad it still leaves at least one madman on the court.
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