Friday, May 16, 2008
A great reason to fear Obama
Four months ago I figuratively shivered at the thought of John Edwards at the helm of the Justice Department. Jonah Goldberg feels the same draft.
What a horror show that would be.
3 Comments:
By 
Steve M. Galbraith, at
Fri May 16, 11:04:00 PM:
How about Associate Justice John Edwards?
Okay, now I'm risking being banned.
More seriously, I wonder if Obama would nominate Tribe? If the Democrats sweep into office - picking up another 6-8 Senate seats - I wouldn't be surprised.
Into the wilderness we go.
By Escort81, at
Sat May 17, 01:10:00 AM:
Tribe, interesting.
He did have a little brush with plagiarism in 2004:
The October 4, 2004 issue of the Weekly Standard, a conservative political magazine, reported that a passage in Tribe's 1985 work, God Save This Honorable Court, is identical to a passage in Justices and Presidents, a 1974 book by Henry J. Abraham, a University of Virginia political scientist. On April 13, 2005, Harvard's President Lawrence Summers and Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan released a statement that Tribe's admitted failure to provide appropriate attribution was a "significant lapse in proper academic practice," but that they regarded the error as "the product of inadvertence rather than intentionality."
[Full disclosure: Prof. Abraham is a family friend]
That probably wouldn't be enough to derail Tribe's nomination, but he'll be 68 years old at the beginning of an Obama first term, and I think that whether a Democrat or Republican is in the WH, a POTUS wants to nominate someone with a strong likelihood of longevity, since it is so hard to get their ideal candidate through the confirmation process.
I'm thinking a female. How about Elena Kagan (PU '81)? Oops, she worked in the Clinton WH.
Michelle would present a separation of powers and conflict of interest issue.
Kathleen Sullivan at Stanford Law?
The Constitution doesn't set forth any qualifications to be a Justice, but I believe all of the current SCOTUS Justices were sitting appellate court judges at the time of their nominations.
By Neil Sinhababu, at
Sat May 17, 04:52:00 AM:
In the past, we've had a bunch of justices who hadn't been judges before. There were a bunch of them on the Warren Court.
