Word: benching
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...prison in Alabama, an elderly inmate who had suffered a stroke was forced to sit on a wooden bench so that he would not soil...
Only a Glimpse. When Byrne mounted the bench to announce his ruling, the courtroom was packed. The corridors were filled with pass holders who had been unable to squeeze in. With the jurors absent during procedural arguments, the jury box was crammed with newsmen. Byrne began briskly: "I am prepared to rule on the motion for dismissal...
...Warren Court, says Simon, "wanted to teach the nation its deepest purposes and meanings. It is that special role that the Burger Court neither serves nor covets." Paradoxically perhaps, Warren, the California Governor and lifelong politician, brought to the bench an expansive and unremitting belief in the strength and power of the law; Warren Burger, the longtime lawyer and judge, came to the court believing that true strength and power reside in the political process. Change in the U.S., he has said, "is a legislative and policy process. And there is a very limited role for courts in this respect...
...Burger took over the court is described in a new book by Lawyer and TIME Correspondent James F. Simon. In His Own Image: The Supreme Court in Richard Nixon's America (McKay; $7.95) is the first comprehensive study of the latest transformation of the nation's highest bench. As such it is a thoroughgoing, readable and up-to-date supplementing of Mr. Dooley's 1901 observation that "no matther whether th' Constitution follows th' flag or not, th' Supreme Court follows th' iliction returns...
...Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell were hardly the first presidential efforts to strike a geographical balance. George Washington, Simon notes, named "to his first court three Northerners and three Southerners." Abraham Lincoln complained that Justices "trample on the rights of others"; he chose men for the high bench largely because they agreed with him. In general, Simon notes, whenever "the U.S. has faced political, social or economic crises on a broad scale, Presidents have felt a greater compulsion to control the court...