Another Melville essay added to web site
May 31, 2009
I have added my essay “”The wild disguise hath almost antick’d us all”: a note on the guises of the Confidence Man in Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade” to the “Other Essays” page of the web site.
Melville essay added to web site
May 29, 2009
I have added my essay on Melville’s Moby Dick to the “Other Essays” page of my web site.
Judge Sotomayor, the GOP, and Judicial Activism
May 26, 2009
Although Sonia Sotomayor is a fine choice to fill Justice Souter’s seat on the Supreme Court, the Republican die-hards are bound to raise the red herring of her being dangerous because she is an “activist” judge. It is past time that this canard were put to rest. The truth is that all judges are activist judges. If the law were crystal clear in its application to concrete cases, we would not need judges to interpret it. The Republicans’ use of the term “activist” in a pejorative sense is of a piece with their tendency (which has succeeded with a gullible public and press) to take a designation that should be laudatory and make it seem disreputable.
When they call a judge activist, they mean no more than that the judge ruled in a way of which they do not approve. They do not call the equally activist right wing judges activist, because theirs is an activism with which the GOP agrees.
That anyone still gives credence to the sophistic rhetoric of the Republicans is astonishing.
A Hispanic to the Supreme Court? Acaso sí. The first? Ciertamente no!
May 2, 2009
I became weary of hearing proponents of then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales’s possible nomination to the Supreme Court claim that he would be the first Hispanic to sit on the court. Now, with the imminent retirement of Justice David Souter and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, talk is being revived of the first Hispanic to sit on the court.
Even President Obama’s appointment of the Hispanic Judge Sotomayor to the Court would not make her the first Hispanic to serve on the highest court of the land.
The first Hispanic to sit on the Supreme Court was Benjamin Cardozo, whom President Hoover appointed to the court in 1932 to fill the seat left vacant by the retirement of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Perhaps we forget Cardozo because of historical amnesia. Or perhaps being eligible for two ethnic subcategories requires that a choice be made of one or the other, so that since Cardozo is both Jewish and Hispanic, once we label him the second Jew to be appointed to the court—Louis Brandeis was the first—he is ineligible to be considered Hispanic, even though he is of Sephardic (Spanish Jewish) ancestry. Or perhaps when we say “Hispanic,” we mean only “New World Hispanic,” in which case we should say so.
Of course, ideally it would be desirable if we could reach the point at which we no longer think in terms of labels, ethnic or other, so that when a candidate is nominated to the Supreme Court, that person is identified simply in terms of jurisprudential qualifications.
