Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.
Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.
However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
You can read the full text here.
The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in the case of Snyder v. Phelps. Just in case you've been living under a rock for the past year or two, here's a clip about the case:Cassandra Wilkinson is a public-access media advocate, a winning short play writer and co-founder and president of Australia's only all Australian music radio station, FBi FM Sydney.
Cassandra has been a senior political advisor to the NSW Treasurer and other Labor Ministers, and the devoted mother of Holiday, parliamentary wife and one time guitarist with obscure '90s fuzz-pop band Raymond Luxury Yacht.
She has half a degree in fine arts and theatre, half a degree in economics and one whole degree in politics. Cassandra lives in Bundeena with her family and visiting deer.
In some cases, the payback is extreme: Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association, was fined $25,000 for criticizing a referee in a tweet after a game.Blogs, of course, have long been rife with the discontented heaping abuse on foes. But academics and researchers who study online attitudes say that same behavior has been less common on Twitter, in part, because many people use their real names. Now it is migrating to the service, attracting lawsuits and leaving users to haggle among themselves about what will be tolerated.
Complicating matters, there are few prescribed social norms on Twitter like those in more closed communities like Facebook. The service has attained mass popularity without much time to develop an organic users’ culture. On top of that, with tweets limited to 140 characters, users come right to the point without context or nuance.
“It’s the same reason why schoolyard fights don’t start out with, ‘I have a real problem with the way you said something so let’s discuss it,’ ” said Josh Bernoff, a researcher and an author of “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.” “You get right to the punch in the nose. Twitter doesn’t allow room for reflection. It gets people to the barest emotion.”
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Bryan Freedman is the lawyer in Los Angeles who is representing Dawn Simorangkir, a designer who markets clothes under the Boudoir Queen label, and who sued Ms. Love for libel in March. The lawsuit contends that Ms. Love “became infatuated” with the designer, asking her to create costumes using vintage material the singer owned.
When Ms. Simorangkir asked to be paid, Ms. Love balked at the price. Ms. Simorangkir, in return, refused to return Ms. Love’s vintage material, according to legal documents filed by Ms. Love’s lawyers. The singer accused the designer of being a liar and thief (among other things) in a number of rambling, misspelled tweets.
“You will end up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead,” read one tweet from Ms. Love in March.
I don't know about you, but having to read all her typos might prompt me to file a lawsuit for emotional distress.
Read more here:
His lawyer argued the case in court, noting
...he tweeted to his 690 followers: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"
The paper concludes:
"This [message] is obviously facetious," he said. "There are at least three exclamation marks. The first to add to the slightly naughty word 'crap'. The last two to the parody of 'to blow the airport sky high'."
In a case with echoes of Chambers' trial, US standup comedian Joe Lipari also landed in court on terrorism charges following an outburst on Facebook over the state of his iPhone.
He bought the phone a year ago and, after it repeatedly crashed, took it back to the Apple Store in Manhattan. They tweaked it, it crashed again, and the next day he went back to get a replacement. After waiting hours he stormed home with no replacement and, while watching Fight Club, updated his Facebook status in parody of a cherished line from the film: "Joe Lipari might walk into an Apple store on Fifth Avenue with an Armalite AR-10 gas powered semi-automatic weapon and pump round after round into one of those smug, fruity little concierges."
In no time at all plain clothes police armed with MP5 machine guns were knocking on his door. It didn't help that he had been smoking dope and found the whole scene hilarious, amusement that continued into court, where he was charged with making terrorist threats.
His case is currently adjourned and expected to be dropped.
When you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's hard to forget his action hero (and some anti-hero) roles in violent films like Conan the Barbarian, True Lies and The Terminator. Now that he is Governor of California, he plays a slightly different role. The Washington Post reports that the upcoming Supreme Court docket includes this:
Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association
Nov. 2: California is the latest state attempting to prevent the sale of "violent" video games to minors. An appeals court said, similar to decisions of courts elsewhere, that the law violates First Amendment free-speech rights.
The Wall Street Journal described the conflict:
The case arose out of Washington State’s 2009 enactment of a law expanding the state’s existing domestic partnership bill. Senate Bill 5688, referred to as the "everything but marriage bill," built upon the state’s existing domestic partnership law to provide that registered domestic partners would have virtually all the state-law rights of married couples. This proved to be a step too far for some committed opponents of same-sex marriage, who promptly began circulating petitions seeking a referendum to repeal the law. Under Washington procedures, if the petitioners acquired sufficient signatures the law would be stopped from going into effect pending the referendum vote. They got the signatures, and the measure went on the 2009 general election ballot as Referendum 71.
Justice Antonin Scalia, using history, sarcasm and political taunts, laid down a barrage of objections Wednesday to a plea that the Supreme Court create a new constitutional right of anonymity for individuals who sign petitions to get policy measures onto election ballots.
...Declaring that the rough-and-tumble of democracy is not for the faint-hearted, what Scalia referred to as the “touchy, feely” sensitivity of some political activists, the Justice said “you can’t run a democracy” with political activity behind a First Amendment shroud. “You are asking us to enter into a whole new field,” Scalia told James Bopp Jr., the lawyer for Washington State signers of an anti-gay rights petition. Politics, the Justice went on, “takes a certain amount of civic courage. The First Amendment does not protect you from civic discourse — or even from nasty phone calls.”
Read more here.
What would Marian the Librarian think if she went into libraries these days? My son's high school librarian was wearing this little number the other day. She was publicizing Banned Books Month, an effort by the American Library Association to highlight attempts to censor books.
