Word: benching
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thomas' biography -- he pulled himself up by his bootstraps from dirt-poor Pin Point, Ga., to Yale Law School and the federal bench -- has inoculated him against criticism of his record: it would seem churlish and hypocritical to attack this black Horatio Alger figure for being insufficiently sensitive to the plight of impoverished blacks. Though he may endure some tough questioning about his two terms as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Ronald Reagan -- and some name calling from blacks who consider him an Uncle Tom because of his conservative views -- Thomas is all but certain...
What you see often depends on where you sit. If it is in a newsroom, you probably believe what democracy needs most is to protect the free flow of information. If it is on a judicial bench or in a prosecutor's office, you probably focus on respect for the rule of law. In truth, free press and fair trial are both important values. But they can collide, and increasingly journalists lose. News organizations find themselves ever more under court order to reveal confidential sources and sometimes to hand over notes en bloc -- often to a lawyer on a fishing...
...call from the Bush Administration last summer was tantalizing. Would you be interested, Federal Judge Ricardo Hinojosa was asked, in a promotion to the federal appeals bench? Hinojosa declined but allowed that he would accept an ambassadorship instead. Dumbfounded, his caller noted that the President might have more in mind for his old Texas friend. Hinojosa didn't take the hint. Thus when Thurgood Marshall retired, Bush apparently didn't feel he could name the Brownsville judge as the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. "If I were him," says a senior White House official, "I'd be kicking myself...
Despite his physical frailty and growing philosophical isolation from his fellow Justices, Marshall's was no meek or defeated departure. His last words from the bench were a stinging rebuke to the court's conservative majority. In a 6-to-3 decision, the Justices ruled that prosecutors in death-penalty cases could introduce evidence about the character of the victim and the suffering caused by the crime -- thereby reversing a precedent that was only four years old. In his majority decision, Chief Justice William Rehnquist argued that while adhering to precedent "is usually the wise policy...
Decked out in a cherry-red suit, Margaret Thatcher rose in the House of Commons last week to warn yet again of the perils of a European superstate. Prime Minister John Major squirmed on the government's front bench, but her commanding performance made some other Tories long for the past...