Word: benching
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...Saturday, a team led by Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, White House counsel C. Boyden Gray and chief of staff John Sununu met with Bush to sort through those names. Bush had declared on Friday, "I want somebody who will be on there not to legislate from the bench but to faithfully interpret the Constitution. So that gives me a wide latitude." During his 1988 campaign, Bush was less fuzzy about his criteria, promising to choose judges "who will show more compassion for the victims than they do for the criminals...
...right-wing agenda is the repeal of Roe v. Wade. O'Connor, the court's only woman, has seemed sympathetic to such a reversal but reluctant to provide the decisive vote in a court split 5 to 4 on the issue. But if another antiabortion Justice joined the bench, O'Connor could take refuge in a 6-to-3 majority...
Brennan, who sprinkled his off-bench conversations with profanity and wrote crisply clear opinions, had an unusually collegial approach to finding the often elusive fifth vote needed to support his views. He would sometimes dispatch his law clerks to find out from their fellows what points bothered other Justices about his position. Then, in early drafts, he would deftly tailor his arguments to overcome their objections. His sharply honed writing often carried...
BUSH COULD obviously see an abortion storm brewing in his Supreme Court nomination. As such, his selection of Souter was necessarily farsighted. A former State Supreme Court judge who has served on the Federal bench for only three months, Souter has almost no record of opinions on national issues like abortion...
...case was argued, having read the briefs, I would write a memorandum myself in which I summarized how I thought the case should be decided and how the opinion should be written. I would give that to a law clerk who would then give me what we call a bench memo. If the case was assigned to me to write, that law clerk in all probability would submit in triple-space form a draft of an opinion that reflected the views I had already set forth. Before a draft opinion was circulated to the other Justices, all four...