Word: benches
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...important U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Chicago. Soon the Senate will vote on whether to confirm him, and the result is being watched intently. For Manion, 44, has become the unhappy symbol of a new turning in the Reagan drive to fill the federal bench with more ideologically congenial judges. By measure of all but the furthest-right yardsticks, Reagan's court appointments in his first four years were certainly conservative. At the same time, they were generally celebrated for their legal acuity at least as much as the nominations of any recent President. But during...
...matched against their joy was a storm of protests, beginning from right inside the nation's top courthouse itself. Justice Antonin Scalia read aloud from the bench his withering dissent that morning five years ago. Joined by then-Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas, Scalia called the decision to strike down laws against sodomy "a massive disruption of the current social order," and predicted that it would lead to the collapse of laws against gay marriage, fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity. "This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation...
...occurrence this season, belying the headlines that greeted both decisions. The gun decision was an anomaly in the way the court was behaving, says Richard Lazarus, director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University's Law School: "In this term there have been few dissents read from the bench and when the justices disagreed it tended not to be along liberal and conservative splits...
America's 17th chief justice assumed the bench with the hopes of uniting a fractured court and issuing opinions with one, unanimous voice. Instead, Roberts got a pileup of concurrences and dissents that often resulted in Kennedy determining the law. In the 24 decisions that came down 5-to-4 last year, Kennedy was the decisive vote in every case, never once dissenting. Of those 24, 19 of them reflected the traditional conservative-liberal split (Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Alito versus John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer) with the conservatives winning...
...conservative court he's been looking for? The next Presidential election could provide the key, especially if a justice retires. Justice Stevens is 88 years old; Justice Ginsberg is 75; and rumors are swirling that Justice Souter, 68, might want to move on after 17 years on the bench. It's possible those three liberal-leaning seats will become open over the next few years. One thing is clear: The Supreme Court's search for a consistent ideological identity will continue to provide high drama...