Tag Archives: Supreme Court

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Online NewsHour: Racial Justice – February 26, 1996

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CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: For more on today’s Supreme Court hearing, we’re joined by Stuart Taylor, correspondent for "The American Lawyer" and "Legal Times" and a NewsHour regular. Stuart, thank you for joining us. There’s probably not much to add to that, but is there anything else that we need to know that clarifies exactly what it is that the court heard today?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Well, they–what they have is a relatively narrow piece of a big social issue. The big social issue is whether we have racial bias in our criminal justice system, and there are lots of statistics showing huge, hugely disproportionate numbers of blacks being locked up for certain crimes, particularly drug crimes, and especially crack cocaine, which has huge penalties. The narrower issue the court is deciding is whether the defendants in this case have made enough of a preliminary showing to get to first base, as it is, as it were in trying the very difficult task of proving race-based selective prosecution which, if proven, is a violation of the Constitution and would justify throwing out the cases against them.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And where would that take us? I mean, where would that leave us in the whole issue of selective prosecution?

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NewsHour: Mandatory Sentencing – February 20, 1996

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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: For more on today’s Supreme Court hearing, we’re joined by Stuart Taylor, correspondent for the "American Lawyer" and "Legal Times," and a regular on the NewsHour. Welcome, Stuart. What was happening in 1984 that caused Congress to want these guidelines, to begin the process of drawing up the guidelines?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: There was a lot of criticism at that time that the traditional method of criminal sentencing, which is letting the judge decide what he thinks is the appropriate sentence out of a huge range of possibilities was leading to wild disparities over the country, depending not so much on the nature of the crime and the criminal as on the judge. Soft judges were giving light sentences to people who did terrible things. Hard, tough judges were giving heavy sentences to people who did less serious things, and there was a convergence of liberal reformers who didn’t like these disparities and conservatives who were worried about some judges mollycoddling criminals, came together and said let’s have some uniformity, let’s tie these judges down to some guidelines so that the sentence doesn’t depend on who the judge is.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And how do the guidelines work? They’re very complicated.

MR. TAYLOR: Right. That principle was carried to very detailed specification initially by Congress but in more detail by the sentencing commission that Congress created of how much the sentence ought to be for every one of the zillion crimes in the federal criminal code, and then with adjustments upwards for the criminal record, and the, the embodiment of it is all this grid which is actually what a federal judge is supposed to use when he passes sentence. You look at the offense level and in this case, for example, these two police officers, they said, we start with six, because they violated the civil rights of Rodney King, and then–

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The Dangers of Judge-Bashing

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

You may not have realized that the Supreme Court-even after a decade under Chief Justice William Rehnquist-is a liberal "judicial dictatorship" that "has centralized control over every moral, political, social, and economic issue in the country," as part of an "intellectual elite that believes the prevailing social order of middle-class America is deeply flawed, unjust, and irrational."

That’s what Patrick Buchanan has been telling Republican audiences as he campaigns for the presidential nomination. He’s also been asserting that the chief "beneficiaries of the Court’s protection" are "members of various minorities including criminals, atheists, homosexuals, flag burners, illegal immigrants (including terrorists), convicts, and pornographers."

And Republican true believers seem to lap it up, as did those assembled at the Heritage Foundation, in Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 29 Buchanan speech quoted above.

Not to be completely outdone in court-bashing, faltering front-runner Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) declared in his Jan. 23 response to President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address that "our liberal courts" are "[at] war with our values," so that we must (yet again!) "untie the hands of our police."

Who is he talking about? Sandra Day O’Connor?

Never mind that Republican presidents appointed nearly two-thirds of all 790 federal judges, including seven of the nine Supreme Court justices. Republican presidential aspirants are once again running against the courts, as they have done ever since Richard Nixon’s campaign in the 1968 election.

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NewsHour: Virginia Military Institute’s Men Only Policy – January 17, 1996

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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You were at the Supreme Court today. Can you summarize the arguments for us?

STUART TAYLOR: Yes. Deputy Solicitor General Paul Bender led off for the Justice Department, and he stressed that VMI’s unique adversative-style education, that’s the buzz word which is kind of the boot camp approach of being abused and harassed by upperclassmen, is a valuable asset and that the VMI degree is a valuable asset to those men who go there, particularly because it’s a very prestigious institution with a loyal alumni body that channels people into successful careers.

He said that there’s no reason women should be denied the benefit of that sort of education; that there are some women who can hack it at a place like VMI, in the records yes, there are some, and that they ought to have that opportunity. He also claims that the arguments VMI has made and the Mary Baldwin people have made for the solution of keeping them in separate places depended on outmoded stereotypes, basically depended on the idea that there are some things women can’t handle, and this is one of them, and that the only remedy, in his view, is to integrate VMI. He says that the Mary Baldwin institution 35 miles down the road is not equal, is not the same, is not as good in, in various ways.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How about the opposing side?

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NewsHour: Drawing Lines – December 5, 1995

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MARGARET WARNER: Joining me is Stuart Taylor. He’s a senior writer at "American Lawyer" and at "Legal Times," and a regular on this program. Welcome, Stuart. First, very briefly, give us the legal history of how we got to this point where you have the Justice Department and two states defending these racially drawn districts.

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Lame Journalism Makes Bad Law

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

"Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose," as Janis Joplin sang it most memorably in "Bobby McGee." With billions of dollars to lose, big news organizations don’t seem to feel so free anymore, at least when it comes to exposing corporate misconduct. On the other hand, some of these mega-businesses seem all too free about taking advantage of their sources.

Consider these recent examples:

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NewsHour: Supreme Court Decision on Gay Rights in Colorado – October 10, 1995

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GALE NORTON, Colorado Attorney General: Our position has been that Amendment Two preserves the status quo, that it allows the people of Colorado as a whole to make the decision about the issue of sexual orientation, and the Justices, through their questioning, saw that issue as being one of the primary concerns.

SUZANNE GOLDBERG, Lambda Legal Defense: The Constitution forbids the singling out of one group of people for different political rules, and today, through our briefs and argument, we made that clear. Amendment Two is a patent of the Constitution for all of the reasons we’ve discussed, but it’s also absurd. And I think that many of the questions today pointed that out.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Now, legal analysis of today’s case. Stuart Taylor, senior writer at "American Lawyer" and "Legal Times," is with Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Stuart, thank you for joining us. What is at issue in this case?

STUART TAYLOR, The American Lawyer: Basically, the state’s voters by initiative adopted what almost comes down to a right of the people to discriminate against homosexuals. It’s more complicated than that. What had happened is that some of the cities in Colorado, Boulder, Denver, and Aspen, had passed gay rights laws. You can’t be fired for being a homosexual. You can’t be denied housing for being a homosexual. The voters of the state basically wiped out those laws with this referendum and said, localities cannot adopt gay rights laws, cannot adopt laws banning discrimination against gays, and nor can the state legislature. So if homosexual people want to get relief from discrimination in Colorado, they have to pass a constitutional amendment getting rid of this one, which apparently doesn’t seem politically likely.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: That’s Amendment Two, and then something like 57 percent of the voters of Colorado voted for it.

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Looking Right at the Justices

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

"Conservatives on Supreme Court Dominated Rulings of Latest Term." "High Court Rulings Hint Move to Right." "The Year the Court Turned to the Right." "The Conservative Majority Solidifies."

If these remind you of the headlines you were reading about three months ago, think again. They were actually taken from end-of-term wrapup pieces in The New York Times in 1984, 1988 (I wrote that one), 1989, and 1991, respectively. Go back to 1972, and you’ll probably find something similar.

So the headline on the July 2, 1995, New York Times wrapup-"Farewell to the Old Order on the Court: The Right Goes Activist and the Center Is a Void"-was not exactly unprecedented.

Nor were those on the 1995 wrapup pieces in The Washington Post ("Court’s Conservatives Make Presence Felt"), USA Today ("High court makes ‘dramatic’ shift: Fall schedule will test court’s conservatism"), and The Los Angeles Times ("1995 Rulings by Supreme Court Herald Dawn of Rehnquist Era").

The journalistic consensus, it appears, is not only that the Court is Turning Right, to borrow the title of Los Angeles Times correspondent David Savage’s fine 1992 book on the Rehnquist Court, but that it has been turning right for a long time, harder and harder as time passes.

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NewsHour: A look at Justice Blackmun’s Legacy – April 6, 1994

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ROBERT MACNEIL: To assess Supreme Court Justice Blackmun’s legacy, we’re joined by four court watchers. Kathleen Sullivan is a professor of law at Stanford University. Charles Fried was solicitor general during the Reagan administration and now teaches at Harvard. Stuart Taylor covers the Supreme Court for American Lawyer Magazine and is a frequent court analyst for The NewsHour, and Harold Koh teaches law at Yale University. He also served as a law clerk for Justice Blackmun on the Supreme Court.

Stuart Taylor, besides the most famous Roe vs. Wade decision, what other decisions mark Justice Blackmun’s time on the court?

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DOJ Nominee’s Authentic Black Views

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Starting in 1981, the Reagan administration adopted the civil-rights agenda of the Republican right wing. It was a cheap way to appease a key constituency. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was put under William Bradford Reynolds, whose policies were skewed by preoccupation with the threat of quotas and reverse discrimination against white males: He adopted a tone of self-righteous ideological certitude that polarized debate and obscured the strengths of his own position.

Now it appears that the Clinton administration may be starting down a similar road by adopting the civil-rights agenda of the Democratic left wing-including a proclivity for pushing the use of thinly veiled racial quotas. The best evidence is President Bill Clinton’s nomination of Lani Guinier, an impressive litigator-scholar with some alarmingly radical views, to head the Civil Rights Division.

Guinier sees white racism as an evil so pervasive and persistent as to require the most drastic of remedies-like junking "American majoritarianism" in favor of court-ordered allocation of "proportionate power" among racial blocs in legislative bodies. She says that civil-rights enforcement is and must be "a result-oriented inquiry, in which roughly equal outcomes, not merely an apparently fair process, are the goal." She suggests black legislators are "authentic representatives" only if they "are politically, psychologically, and culturally black."

And she has reviled Reynolds, six Supreme Court justices, and others with a bitterness and stridency that makes Reynolds’ rhetoric seem almost mild by comparison.