MrRodgers
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Joined: 7/30/2005
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I agree with Prof. Stone, the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law. Mr. Stone received his J.D. from the University of Chicago. There is a deep polarization between right and left.
No that long of a read and exactly on point. The right wants to see the wealthy and the corporations enjoy more political power and the poor continually disenfranchised enough, not to do...anything about it.
This is what the Roberts court has done: [Their] judge’s holding in a case is an ad hoc response to a unique state of facts, rationalized, after the event, with a dissimulation more or less conscious, and fitted willy-nilly into the Procrustean bed of approved doctrine. The motivations of the judicial response are buried, obscure, unconscious and even to the judge...unknowable.”
On Stone's 20 biggest cases since 2000 Here
“First, the justices are much more polarized along ideological lines in the most important constitutional cases,” Stone wrote. “Second, the justices appear to vote in a much more result-oriented manner in the most important constitutional cases.”
To test these two theses, Stone examined the underlying rationale of the decisions in terms of judicial activism – overturning precedent or ruling congressional actions unconstitutional (commonly associated with liberalism) and judicial restraint (commonly associated with conservatism)
According to Stone, liberal legal thinkers grant “a great deal of deference to the elected branches of government – except when such deference would effectively abdicate the responsibility the Framers had imposed upon the judiciary to serve as an essential check against the inherent dangers of democratic majoritarianism.”
Circumstances justifying liberal judicial activism, Stone wrote, occur “when the governing majority systematically disregarded the interests of a historically underrepresented group, such as blacks, ethnic minorities, political dissidents, religious dissenters, and persons accused of crime, and when there was a risk that a governing majority was using its authority to stifle its critics, entrench the political status quo, and/or perpetuate its own political power.”
“Thus, in my view, the approach reflected in the voting patterns of Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan in these twenty cases seems well grounded” and is consistent with “their distinctive understanding of the special responsibility of courts in our constitutional system.”
Here's my point, I agree and signals the activism of the right since 2000.
Stone found no such consistency in votes of the five most conservative justices in the 20 major cases. The pattern of their decisions cannot, he argued, be explained by either of the two major intellectual themes of conservative legal thinking, judicial restraint and originalism.
In his study, Stone concluded that in these cases, the votes of members of the court’s right flank were “determined first-and-foremost by their own personal policy preferences.” The court’s conservatives “no doubt believe that they decide each case as it comes to them, like umpires calling balls and strikes. But given the strikingly ideological pattern of their votes in these cases, and the absence of any plausible theory to explain them, this is simply not credible.”
The legal debate is just one part of the political struggle between left and right. The intensity and irreconcilability of the legal conflict reflects the widening gulf separating the two coalitions. This is a dispute that can only be resolved at the ballot box, which explains why conservative justices have focused so intently on protecting the political power of the rich in campaign finance cases and restricting the political leverage of the poor and minorities in voting rights cases. Here
I am a conservative and this is a large reason why am independent and I hate the right wing, mostly republicans politicians of today.
< Message edited by MrRodgers -- 5/7/2014 7:30:59 PM >
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SCOTUS not conservative but activist - 
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