« Done with Kos | Main | Calling a spade a spade »
July 06, 2005
Decrepit Judges
Don't miss Reason's interview with historian David J. Garrow on "Supreme Court Senility"(h/t: CJ blogger Gadsden Flag). On the Justices' golden years:
--Thurgood Marshall: "Slow, feeble, and increasingly deaf, he once embarrassed himself during oral arguments by revealing he didn't realize which side the lawyer he was interrogating represented.
-- Harry Blackmun "ceded to his law clerks much greater control over his official work than did any of the other 15 justices from the last half-century whose papers are publicly available" not because he wasn't capable but because "he just didn't want to."
-- "William O. Douglas closed out his time on the bench by dozing during arguments, addressing people by the wrong names, and speaking in non sequiturs."
-- "Joseph McKenna was so incompetent at the end of his term that, in the words of his colleague William Howard Taft, he once "wrote an opinion deciding the case one way when there had been a unanimous vote the other, including his own."
Maybe Bruce Bartlett is onto something.
Posted by bill at July 6, 2005 03:20 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.citizen-journal.net/cgi-bin/mt-316/mt-tb.cgi/237
