[lotuseclat79]

So Much For The False “Activist Judges” Canard….

In a recent study of justices on the Supreme Court of the United States, guess which justices were the most "activist" in terms of willingness to wholly overturn or disregard precedents? I'll give you one guess: the Republicans.

-- Tom

[linskyjack]

Of course. This has been a strategy or the right wing for years. They yell about the purity of the Constitution, but are open to "interpretation" of the Constitution when it suits their political goals.

[poochee]

Originally Posted by lotuseclat79

So Much For The False “Activist Judges” Canard….

In a recent study of justices on the Supreme Court of the United States, guess which justices were the most "activist" in terms of willingness to wholly overturn or disregard precedents? I'll give you one guess: the Republicans.

-- Tom

Yep! Interesting.

[bassetman]

Originally Posted by linskyjack

Of course. This has been a strategy or the right wing for years. They yell about the purity of the Constitution, but are open to "interpretation" of the Constitution when it suits their political goals.

Always has been, always will be!

[BanditFlyer]

Did any of you guys read this part of the article?

The authors examined one substantive area of the law: criminal defendants’ rights.

Did any of you notice that it was an "Editorial"? In the "Opinion" section of the New York Times?

gee, i wonder if the article might have presented things in a slighly biased way. Nahh, couldn't have.

[Mulderator]

LOL!!! This is precious--we have the typical parade of uneducated Moore-Ons pontificating about the law. Did any of you ACTUALLY go read this "study" the article refers to? I bet not one of you. A few points to educate you (well, not you but anyone else reading this that wants an accurate account).

1. First, when people talk about "liberal activist" judges they are NOT talking about the propensity to overturn prior case law--that's the specific job of Supreme Court Justices for Godsakes! They are talking about liberal judges invalidating legislation and the will of the people. So you Moore-Ons strike out right out of the box because as usual you've let some other Moore-On pose an incorrect premise and then go on to prove it--which of course means nothing because the asserted premise has to be correct in the first instance (that's the basic problem you Moore-Ons have with logic on a consistent basis).

2. Second, the study that was done used law students to rank the judges subjectively based on comments they made at judicial hearing taken totally out of context. Here is how the study proponents justified the use of law students to serve as the foundation of the entire study:

We distributed these packets of quotations to 119 second and third year law students. Each student received one packet. For reasons of cost and convenience, students are often used as stand-ins for the general population, especially in experimental research. . . Nevertheless, considerations of cost and convenience played a role here too. Law professors or experienced appellate practitioners, for example, would offer even greater expertise****(uhhhh--no--they'd offer "expertise"--law students can't offer any expertise because they have none)****, but students are more accessible (****and much more liberal! )

Would you Moore-Ons want law students representing you in court?

3. Even if we accept the propriety of law students ranking Supreme Court Justices the study itself concedes there is not much difference statistically among the Justices EXCEPT for Rhenquist:

The differences between the nominees are not sharp, however. All but one of the nominees are located within the middle third of the range, i.e., from 4.0 to 6.0.

Translation: Statistically the study is meaningless--there is too little difference in standard deviation among the rankings except for Rhenquist who isn't even one of the judges that allegedly is overturning precedent (its Scalia and Thomas).

4. Finally, I would expect a significant degree of overturn of prior cases by the Rhenquist Court. For several decades prior, the Warren Court ran roughshod on judicial precedent overturning long standing case precedent and legislation and coming up with absolutely absurd legal decisions such as Roe v. Wade. This study was on cases from 1994 to 2000. So what you would need to do is look at each of the cases and see if in fact that case had overturned a prior precedent (or overturned prior legislation) and then whether the Rhenquist Court was simply putting things back the way they were before. I'd love to see the cases they claim are an overturn of precendet (I'm sure GB would as well) and I would bet you money most of them were Warren Court-era decisions being overturned after the Warren Court had overturned previous precedent or invalidating legislation.

But in any event, this whole study does not even address the issue of judicial activism. What you'd need to do is check how often a judge invalidates legislation--that's the real test of judicial activism beause a judge is overturning the will of the people--not previous judge-made law. Liberal judges do that because they can't get it accomplished through the legislative process.

In conclusion, you Moore-Ons are a continuing source of supreme entertainment--especially Lotuseclaptrap--you come up with more garbage then the city dump!!!

Can't wait to see GB's response to this!

[Mulderator]

Anyone interested in the study can find it here:

http://www.law.umn.edu/news/constcom_20080417.html

There is a PDF link at the bottom.

[Bastiat]

Originally Posted by BanditFlyer

Did any of you guys read this part of the article?
Did any of you notice that it was an "Editorial"? In the "Opinion" section of the New York Times?

gee, i wonder if the article might have presented things in a slighly biased way. Nahh, couldn't have.

It goes deeper then that. Read the article again, the author is complaining that the alleged conservative Supreme Court members aren't following prior precedent but rather taking what the author describes as an "activist" role in overturning the precedent. Think about it.

The conservative Court members aren't willing to rely on precedent established by liberal justices, such precedent being at odds with the Constitution as written. So because conservative Justices won't follow liberal precedents but, rather, render decisions based upon the Constitution as written the liberals call them "activists" Judges. Liberalism as work.

[Mulderator]

And if there is a doubt as to the biases of the law professors in this completely biased and subjective study, consider this:

While Justice Scalia offered the most criticism of legislative history, he was not as hostile to it as might be expected from his subsequent behavior on the bench, such as his occasional refusal to join sections or footnotes of majority opinions that deal with legislative history. During his hearings, Justice Scalia described legislative history as “a significant factor in interpreting a statute,” adding that he would use what seemed to him as “reliable legislative history when it is available to be used” and that he would “not exclude it as a basis for [his] decisions as [he had] not in the past.” In large part, his comments might not be all that distinguishable from Justices Souter and Ginsburg. In one ex-change, however, he did go further than those Justices in expressing his skepticism about legislative history:

Largely because of this statement, we opted to rank Justice Scalia as the nominee most hostile to the use of legislative history, at least among the seven Justices who commented on the topic.

Are you ******* kidding me? How in the world does that comment indicate "hostility" to legislative history? And these Moore-Ons on that statement alone despite conceding that his comments "might not be all that distinguishable from Justices Souter and Ginsberg" OPTED to rank Scalia as the nominee most hostile to the use of legislative history!

Seriously--can even you Moore-Ons express any confidence in the results of this "study?"

What a piece of garbage.

[Bastiat]

Originally Posted by Mulderator

Can't wait to see GB's response to this!

This thread was posted four days ago and I fought the urge to respond then even after reading the posts from our resident mouth-breathers. There is just so much liberal stupidity posted at this site that it would be a full-time job to respond to each one, so I, like when dealing with a troublesome child, decide to pick and choose which aberrant behavior needs addressing or, in the case of this site, which stupidity. But for BF's post I was willing to overlook this gross stupidity.

[Mulderator]

God this gets even better!!! Read this explanation of how they came up with whether a judge used "legislative history" in coming to his decision. Now--it is absolutely impossible to make that determination because judges don't always affirmately state why they came to a decision (i.e., "I decided this case based on legislative history"). So this is how they first qaulified them as being open to or adverse to using legislative history:

We also examined the Justices’ confirmation hearing state-ments in an additional area—the use of legislative history in statutory interpretation. As before, we extracted the statements from the hearings in which the nominees spoke about their views on legislative history. This time, however, we did not rely on student evaluators. Instead, we evaluated the quotations ourselves. There were several reasons for taking an alternative approach with this topic. We were primarily concerned that we would not have enough student participation to include four different sets of quotations, but there also is some value in taking alternative approaches to studying this topic. LOL In evaluating the statements about legislative history, however, we knew the identities of the speakers. While we were not conscious of any impact from this knowledge, we cannot rule out the possibility that it influenced our rankings of the nominees.

So you Moore-Ons understand what they just said, "We recognize this is completely and totally subjective on our part and since we are liberals, we decided to rake the two most conservative judges, Scalia and Thomas, over the coals."

[Mulderator]

OK--if there was any doubt up to this point what a garbage study this was, this puts the proverbial nail in the coffin--this from the conclusions of the study of these three Moore-Ons "professors" (term used loosely):

Any recommendation about questions, however, must be qualified. Our survey results are by no means definitive. The student rankings, in all three areas, show a high degree of variation. In all but five situations, each Justice received the full range of possible ranks in each issue area. Moreover, the standard deviations in the Justices’ rankings were relatively high, particularly with regard to stare decisis and originalism.

. . .There are, however, other possible reasons for the variations. It is possible, for example, that the full scope of information conveyed at a confirmation hearing cannot be captured by looking solely at a nominee’s responses to questions. Context matters. **** Ya think? ***** It may be that in stripping the identities of the nominees and the nature of the questions asked (and of the questioner) we stripped away too much critical contextual information, thereby making it impossible for our survey participants to make meaningful distinctions between the Justices’ statements . . . *****No --say it ain't so ******, even though such distinctions may have been possible if more information were provided.

Alternatively, our student rankers may not have been up to the task presented to them. *****No! It can't be!!! **** We assumed second and third year law students could act as a reasonably good proxy for an interested and reasonably informed but non-expert public (the audience of constituents that the Senators themselves presumably care about). This assumption may not be correct. ****No--it can't be! ****

Too funny! Even more funny the usual suspect TSG Moore-Ons accept the study lock, stock, and barrel!!!

[Mulderator]

Here is my question. How can any reasonably minded person give lotuseclaptrap any credibility whatsoever--about 90% of what he posts is absolute and unadulterated crap! This is yet another very good example.

[lotuseclat79]

Hi Muldie,

Yet again you demonstrate your total unadulterated crap standard reply. You must be very constipated by now - you know, when your muffler gets clogged up and your car starts farting. Except now you've taken your mouth farting to a whole new level!

You must be a liarwyer! A very practiced crap shooting liarwyer - out of the mouth of a liarwyer!

-- Tom

[Mulderator]

Originally Posted by lotuseclat79

Hi Muldie,

Yet again you demonstrate your total unadulterated crap standard reply. You must be very constipated by now - you know, when your muffler gets clogged up and your car starts farting. Except now you've taken your mouth farting to a whole new level!

You must be a liarwyer! A very practiced crap shooting liarwyer - out of the mouth of a liarwyer!

-- Tom

Good response--that will enhance your credibility tremendously.

BTW--what you got in this thread was a good old fashioned arse--whoopin. Better for you to have just saved face and admit what you posted was pure garbage.