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 – Our Unjust Sentencing System: The Wrecking Ball As Cure
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Acting Solicitor General Paul Clement speaks of "carnage and wreckage" in the federal criminal-sentencing system. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer worries that his colleagues may be destroying the "noble objective" of ending unjust disparities in the sentencing of similar defendants for similar misconduct. Law professor Frank Bowman accuses the Supreme Court of creating "a ghastly mess, bringing the federal criminal-justice system to a virtual halt and putting a number of state systems in disarray."
Opening Argument – Destructive Campaign Rhetoric: A Bipartisan Problem
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
"Kerry and his advisers have behaved disgracefully" in some recent public comments, writes William Kristol in the current issue of The Weekly Standard.
Opening Argument – Imperial Judges Could Pick the President — Again
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Both major parties are marshaling armies of lawyers — tens of thousands of them — to be ready for battle over every important aspect of this year’s election process, before, during, and after Election Day, wherever the potential for partisan advantage exists.Targeting sympathetic judges and election officials who might be predisposed to tip the results in battleground states including Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, these lawyers will be cooking up grounds — or pretexts — for Florida-2000-style recounts and other challenges. It seems all too possible that if the presidential election is close, the courts will once again put us through weeks of uncertainty and once again determine the outcome. The resulting explosion of bitterness could dwarf the one after Bush v. Gore, further depleting the legitimacy of our political and legal processes alike.
The Affirmative Action Decisions
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
In approving racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion for the Court tacitly endorsed an essentially permanent regime of racial balancing through preferences while purporting to ban both racial balancing and permanent preferences. At the same time, in striking down the all-too-transparent point system used to award racial preferences by the university’s undergraduate school, in Gratz v. Bollinger, the justices signaled that concealment of the nature and magnitude of racial preferences–which has long been indispensable to their political sustainability–will henceforth be the way for selective universities to insulate them from legal challenge as well.
Taken together, the decisions reflect the majority’s evident desire to perpetuate the racial-preference regime long used by almost all major establishment institutions while using obfuscation to insulate it from the overwhelming popular disapproval that candor would have provoked.i
I. Grutter’s impact: a racial spoils system forever?
In Grutter, Justice O’Connor, who had never before voted to uphold a system of racial preferences, quoted a 1977 article asserting that "[i]t would be a sad day indeed, were America to become a quota-ridden society, with each identifiable minority assigned proportional representation in every desirable walk of life." But now she has done more than anyone alive to entrench just such a pervasive racial spoils system. In doing so, she and her four more liberal colleagues have cast aside, perhaps forever, the Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream of an America in which people are judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Opening Argument – Bush Has Botched North Korea. Would Kerry Do Better?
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
President Bush claims that his tough, confrontational approach to the bad guys of the world has made America safer. But on his watch, the world’s most dangerous regime — North Korea — has openly declared that it is building nuclear bombs as fast as it can. It may already (experts speculate) have as many as a dozen, and it shows signs of preparing its first nuclear bomb test. Nukes in the hands of this paranoid, impoverished regime — which is also building long-range missiles and seems quite capable of selling nukes to Al Qaeda — represent a vastly greater threat to American cities than Saddam Hussein ever did.
It’s unclear whether any president could have prevented this, short of war. But it’s hard to imagine anyone doing much worse than Bush has done. Looking to the future, would John Kerry do better? The answer may turn on a blood-curdling choice: Would it be better to pin all our hopes on peaceful negotiations that seem less than likely to stop North Korea from building a vast nuclear arsenal? Or should we threaten — and, if necessary, launch — pre-emptive bombing attacks that could lead to another all-out Korean war and even the nuking of South Korea and Japan?
Opening Argument – The Military’s Mess at Guantanamo And How To Fix It
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
The first of the ad hoc military "commissions," which finally held its first pretrial hearings at the Bush administration’s Guantanamo Bay prison camp in late August, has been something of an international embarrassment. We can do better.
Opening Argument – The Threat That Bush, Kerry — and the Voters — Ignore
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
We all know that the retirement and health care demands of the 76 million Baby Boomers will put unprecedented strain on the already deficit-ridden federal budget, beginning about 2008 and growing for many decades. We also know that we have become dangerously dependent on foreign lenders to finance both our government’s profligacy and the yawning gap between what the American people consume and what we produce.
Opening Argument – Our Imperial, Unjudicial, Disingenuous, Indispensable Court
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Liberals say the Supreme Court is too conservative. Conservatives say it’s too liberal. But many experts in both camps agree that the nine current justices have taken us too far down the road of judicial supremacy.
Opening Argument – Edwards and the Problem with the Trial-Lawyer Lobby
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards as his running mate has produced an outpouring of corporate complaints about the damage that a plaintiffs’ personal-injury lawyer could do as vice president.
Opening Argument – How Bush’s Overreaching Hurts the War Against Terrorism
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
On June 22, top Bush appointees beat an undignified retreat from the administration’s previous claims — in classified memos that have been leaked recently — of virtually unlimited presidential power to authorize use of torture in wartime interrogations. Six days later, the Supreme Court rejected by 6-3 President Bush’s claim of total power to detain non-Americans at Guantanamo Bay without answering to any court. And eight justices rejected Bush’s denial of due process to Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen whom he has held virtually incommunicado in Navy brigs for more than two years, including 21 months without seeing a lawyer.