Word: benching
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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...
...tried to rattle Marshall by questioning him on more than 60 obscure legal and historical matters. Marshall did not have the answers for Thurmond, but he spoke persuasively enough on the main issues to be confirmed by 69 votes to 11. After Marshall had served four years on the bench, Lyndon Johnson made him Solicitor General in 1965, a prelude to naming him to the court two years later...
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...