Word: benching
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...September 1978. Senior halfback Wayne Moore, banished to the bench for two years, breaks four tackles and accelerates like a cruise missile on an end sweep against Columbia that goes for a 73-yd. TD. (A broken ankle the next week ends Moore's season...
Judges do not just judge any more; they legislate, make policy, even administer. Indeed, says U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Irving Kaufman, "sometimes it seems that business, psychology and sociology degrees, in addition to a law degree, should be prerequisites for the federal bench." When Boston's duly elected school committee refused to bus schoolchildren, the local federal judge did it himself, right down to approving the bus routes. A federal judge in Alabama ruled that inadequate mental-health care is unconstitutional. So what is adequate? His answer was a list of 84 minimal standards, reaching down...
...voting for. Federal judges are appointed for life; they can be removed only by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, and so far only four have been so punished (the last in 1936). One despotic old coot, Judge Willis Ritter of Utah, was allowed to stay on the bench, despite his erratic behavior and abusive temper (he even threatened workmen with contempt for making too much noise near the courtroom), until he died at 79 last year...
...sword. Indeed, the first Chief Justice of the United States, John Jay, who resigned to be Governor of New York, refused President John Adams' invitation to return, saying that the court lacked "weight and dignity." It was the fourth Chief Justice, John Marshall, who gave the federal bench real clout. Marshall, who believed that a judge should be responsible not to Congress or the President but only to "God and his own conscience," declared in Marbury vs. Madison (1803) that the judiciary had the right, indeed the duty, to strike down acts of Congress that conflicted with the Constitution...
...invoked less in the cause of the poor and the black, it has been extended to just about everyone else, including aliens, bastards and even 18-to-21-year-old males who were barred from drinking 3.2 beer in Oklahoma while women were not. And in areas the high bench has refused to enter, state courts are now active; for example, courts in New York, California, Ohio, Connecticut and New Jersey have mandated equal financing for school districts. Whatever restraint the courts have shown, says Harvard's Freund, are "eddies in the mainstream...