Welcome to my archives. This is a long list of most of the commentaries and longer articles I have written since 1989; the hundreds of articles I wrote for the New York Times from 1980-1988 can be found via the SELECTED MEDIA OUTLETS box. They are sorted by date, with the most recent posts first. If you want to find something specific, I would encourage you to use the search feature in the sidebar. It is powered by Google. It is fast and accurate.
Opening Argument – The Court, And Foreign Friends, as Constitutional Convention
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
The idea of putting a person to death for a murder committed at age 17 or younger strikes many of us as grotesque. So it may seem fitting that five Supreme Court justices held on March 1 that juvenile executions violate "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" — the touchstone since 1958 for determining whether punishments are unconstitutionally "cruel and unusual."
Opening Argument – Males, Females, And Math: The Evidence
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
I wish to propound a hypothesis that I can only begin to document here and will abandon should it be undermined by further study: A very large percentage of the professors and administrators at Harvard and most (if not all) other prestigious universities in this country are high-IQ ninnies, ideologues, cowards, and/or hypocrites.
Opening Argument – Genocide in Darfur: Crime Without Punishment?
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
"Not on my watch," wrote President Bush in early September 2001, in the margin of a report on President Clinton’s limp response to the 1994 genocide that took 800,000 lives in Rwanda.
Opening Argument – Arnold’s Amendment: Moderates Strike Back
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed last month to end (in California, at least) the incumbent-protection racket that is congressional and legislative redistricting, some Democrats accused him of a Texas-style power-grab for more Republican seats.
Opening Argument – Why Feminist Careerists Neutered Larry Summers
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male.
Opening Argument – Better Justice: Bush’s Missed Opportunity
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
"Tort reform" is a dreary phrase for what could be a noble and exciting endeavor. It could be about fixing our system of justice so that more victims maimed by reckless conduct will get the compensation they need, when they need it; so that fewer good doctors and good companies will get soaked for misfortunes that weren’t their fault; so that the insurance premiums and prices we all pay will no longer be inflated by legal waste, fraud, and abuse.
Opening Argument – How to End Interbranch Warfare On Criminal Sentencing
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
The birthing process was protracted, ugly, and unprincipled. But the baby doesn’t look as bad as expected. And it may do OK unless it’s strangled in its crib by Congress or abused by the judiciary.
Opening Argument – Distorting the Law and Facts in the Torture Debate
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Many human-rights groups and other critics of Bush administration policy on squeezing information out of captured terrorism suspects would have you believe that even mildly coercive "stress" interrogation methods are clearly illegal and indistinguishable from torture.
Opening Argument – Congress Must Stop Ignoring ‘Enemy Combatants’
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Amid the uproar over the possible responsibility of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in the abuse of many "enemy combatants," a substantial consensus on the need for congressional rules to govern the detention of such people is quietly emerging among experts, including moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, and even some strong libertarians.
President Bush and the Court
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
A lot of liberals, and a lot of conservatives, think that President Bush is speaking in code when he says he would nominate to the Supreme Court "strict constructionists" who would "faithfully interpret the law, not legislate from the bench."
Just as liberal activist judges have driven millions of moderates into the Republican fold, conservative activist judges could drive them back out. Karl Rove must know this. So must Bush.
After all, didn’t Bush once cite Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas as his model justices? And haven’t they both voted to overrule Roe v. Wade? To uphold laws making homosexual acts criminal? To outlaw government use of racial preferences? To allow state-sponsored school prayers (at least at graduations and football games)? To require states to subsidize religious instruction (at least in some contexts)? To overrule Miranda v. Arizona? To strike down many federal laws as violating states’ rights?
Well, yes – but. Bush surely has committed himself to naming to the Court conservatives who would not invent new constitutional rights. But some conservative jurists are far less radical, and far more deferential to established precedents, than others. And if you imagine that Bush wants to pack the Court with Scalia/Thomas clones determined to sweep aside Roe and a raft of other liberal precedents, ask yourself this: What would that do to Republicans’ hope of securing their fragile majority status, and to Bush’s legacy?
The answer is that just as liberal activist judges have driven millions of moderates into the Republican fold, conservative activist judges could drive them back out. Karl Rove must know this. So must Bush.