Tag Archives: SCOTUS

Charles A. Reich (1928-2019)

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I am truly sad to report that former Yale law professor Charles Reich died last Saturday at age 91.  He was a brilliant mind, a beautiful writer, a wise teacher, a sharp lawyer, a kind soul, and a dear friend and hero to many.

Here’s an obituary article in today’s NYT:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/books/charles-reich-dead.html.

Much will and much should be written about Charles Reich, his work, and his influence.  Writers will emphasize The Greening of America, surely and properly—these are its closing paragraphs, a permanent creed of hope:

We have all known the loneliness, the emptiness, the plastic isolation of contemporary America.  Our forebears came thousands of miles for the promise of a better life.  Now there is a new promise.  Shall we not seize it?  Shall we not be pioneers once more, since luck and fortune have given us a vision of hope?

The extraordinary thing about this new consciousness is that it has emerged out of the wasteland of the Corporate State, like flowers pushing up through the concrete pavement.  Whatever it touches it beautifies and renews, and every barrier falls before it.

We have been dulled and blinded to the injustice and ugliness of slums, but the new consciousness sees them as just that — injustice and ugliness —as if they had been there to see all along.  We have all been persuaded that giant organizations are necessary, but it sees that they are absurd, as if the absurdity had always been obvious and apparent.  We have all been induced to give up our dreams of adventure and romance in favor of the escalator of success, but it says that the escalator is a sham and the dream is real.

And these things, buried, hidden, and disowned in so many of us, are shouted out loud, believed in, affirmed by a growing multitude of young people who seem too healthy, intelligent and alive to be wholly insane, who appear, in their collective strength, capable of making it happen.  For one almost convinced that it was necessary to accept ugliness and evil, that it was necessary to be a miser of dreams, it is an invitation to cry or laugh.  For one who thought the world was irretrievably encased in metal and plastic and sterile stone, it seems a veritable greening of America.

They also will highlight his article “The New Property,” and how it led to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Goldberg v. Kelly.

There’s much, much more.

See each of Charles Reich’s books.

See everything that Charles wrote about the U.S. Supreme Court, including what he wrote about Justice Hugo L. Black, for whom Charles clerked during October Term 1953, the term in which the Court decided Brown v. Board of Education.

See the twenty-four (at least) deep and lyrical law review articles that Charles published between 1962 and 2010,

See this fine Twitter thread by Professor Karen Tani:  https://twitter.com/kmtani/status/1140983478416052225.

Here is a blog where Charles Reich wrote and posted some things in the past couple of years: https://www.charlesareich.com/blog-1?fbclid=IwAR2ZHBkLCrS6DlJEEPLzdZb2RsUDM_ecjLtxfLIIUro8xfKz1d2wvAayO_o.  In the “Observatory” section, see his great photos of his friend Justice William O. Douglas hiking alongside the C&O Canal, and a super photo of them sharing a look, a canteen, and smiles.

I recall some advice that Charles gave me about law professor scholarship (and really it is advice about literature, which Charles knew well, and which he believed that any serious writing should try to be.)  He said that it is important to find worthy topics and do the very best that you can, with all that you know and with all that you can learn, from inside yourself, to write about them.  I asked him what his topic had been, especially when he was getting started.  He recalled spending a summer, I think it was the one after his first year of teaching, sitting in the Yale law library, working at a table covered with many books, writing “about America.”

He did it very, very well – he saw America, he loved it, and he improved it.

A Law Faculty Candidate and His Judicial Reference (1934)

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Posted over on PrawfsBlawg (thanks!), a piece on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo and a lawyer who was seeking in 1934 to become a law professor.

October 4, 1934:  Justice Cardozo, wearing his Phi Beta Kappa key.

A Word Against Smearing Supreme Court Justices

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Gabe Roth of the advocacy group Fix the Court published an Op-Ed essay, “The Supreme Court Is Being Hypocritical,” in today’s New York Times.  He points to factual circumstances in various cases that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided recently or is considering.  He argues that these facts and the concerns they raise (in his mind) apply not just to the litigants in those cases, but to the Justices too.

Mr. Roth calls these cases the Court’s “self-referential docket,” but really he’s criticizing what he sees as the Justices’ failures to reference themselves.  He wants the Justices to see ethical issues in their own behaviors and, in response, to promulgate new rules to address them, and to behave in ways that he thinks would be ethically better.

Alas, his list of particulars is flawed.  To wit:

  • Yes, Elena Kagan was Solicitor General of the U.S. before her appointment to the Court. But she did not “surely” have significant involvement as S.G. in Affordable Care Act cases.  In fact, it is well-documented that she avoided them, perhaps because her judicial appointment was already impending when those cases began.
  • Yes, Justices and their family members do own stocks (as many, many people do, directly or at least indirectly). But the ideas that Justice Stephen Breyer or Chief Justice John Roberts—each rich beyond the point of having financial needs or concerns, by the way—cast votes in Supreme Court cases so as to raise their stock share prices is just outrageous.  And so is the idea that Breyer, Roberts, or Justice Samuel Alito, or any justice, will cast a vote in a pending insider trading case so as to move financial markets in the justice’s favor.
  • Yes, the Supreme Court has not recently taken a case to review the constitutionality of a law banning certain protests on the plaza in front of the Court building. And yes, the Court in 2014 unanimously invalidated a state law barring protesters within 35 feet of abortion clinics (McCullen v. Coakley).  But Roth’s implication that judicial self-interest explains these differing legal outcomes oversimplifies matters, vastly—as reading various Supreme Court and lower court decisions on these and other “buffer zone”/speech restriction laws will quickly demonstrate.
  • Yes, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the Court, when it upheld Missouri’s age 70 mandatory retirement rule for its judges, that “physical and mental capacity sometimes diminish with age.” (No kidding.)  And yes, Justice Antonin Scalia died last winter just before his 80th birthday, and Justice Anthony Kennedy recently celebrated his 80th.  And Roth’s point?  The idea that any Justices is forgetting his or her age and not monitoring his or her capacities is absurd.  The implication that Justice Scalia had become too infirm to serve, or that any Justice now is, is insulting because it is refuted by their performances on the bench, which occur in public and then are preserved on audio tape, and in their written opinions.

Mr. Roth’s bad examples only weaken his meritorious arguments.  Yes, the Court/the Justices could do much more to advance Court transparency and thus public appreciation for its performance.  For instance, filming oral arguments and then making those films publicly available, routinely but perhaps after an interval of time, would improve public education without affecting much how the Court does its work.

It only sets back public discourse, and it probably makes the Justices less receptive to sound reform proposals, to claim falsely that the Court is broken.

“He’s Been Shot. HELP Him!”

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I assume that when a police officer comes upon an injured, and especially a gravely injured, person, the officer typically calls for medical help (EMS) and then, while waiting for its arrival, provides whatever first aid and comfort the officer can.

This seems not to be happening in instances where the person has been injured by the police—and to be specific, where the person has been shot by the police.  This New York Times story chronicles a number of incidents, captured on publicly-released video, where recent police shootings have been followed by groups of officers standing around, just looking at the shot, often dying, person.

Many things might cause this inaction.  At the threshold, some situations and settings might be actively dangerous—a shot person is not automatically safe to approach or to touch.  Some officers, especially shooters, might also be in a kind of shock, frozen in the moment.  Some officers, not knowing much first aid, might feel unqualified to do anything.  Some shooting victims are, possibly, so obviously “gone” that nothing will aid them.  But some police inaction might be based in callousness, and in failures of trainers and commanders to encourage, direct and build human empathy.

We—society, and every police chief, and every individual officer—need to fix this.  Policing, properly done, is about law enforcement.  But it also is about caring for the community, and each person among us.  We recognize this in our constitutional law:  the Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, including touching and handling persons, but it is objectively reasonable for police officers to engage in searches and seizures when they are trying to help an injured person.  (See Chief Justice Roberts’s 2006 opinion for the unanimous Supreme Court in Brigham City v. Stuart.)

Yes, it can be constitutionally reasonable for the police to seize a person by, for valid reasons, shooting him or her—that is the lawful use of deadly force.  But even after a lawful seizure of a person, the government may not arbitrarily cause suffering.  (Think of a convicted criminal lawfully incarcerated.  The government has seized him.  But it may not then torture him or, without reason, deny him basic attention, care and sustenance.)

I have never come upon a shooting victim.  But I have seen injuries, and I have been injured—as you have too.  As a bystander, I’ve tried to help—to perform modest first aid, to speak words of comfort, to stay at the side of the person in pain.  As a victim, I’ve received the first aid, the kind words, the held hand, and I’ve been grateful.  It seems a basic thing that makes our world decent.

Our cops—our community caretakers—should jump in to care for injured people as much, as often, as reflexively, as they jump into situations to enforce our laws.  I believe that this instinct is already in most cops as people, or it was.  It should be reignited, trained, encouraged, rewarded, applauded.

Every victim of violence is a person whom the police have, commendably, sworn to protect.