Word: bork
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Announcing Kennedy's selection Wednesday, Reagan and his aides put on a show of sweet harmony. Attorney General Edwin Meese, architect of the disastrous Bork and Ginsburg nominations, and Chief of Staff Howard Baker, who had fought all along for a Kennedy-style moderate, made a point of posing ! together wreathed in grins. The President appealed for "cooperation and bipartisanship" in Kennedy's confirmation hearings and pledged to do his part. "The experience of the last several months has made all of us a bit wiser," he said. Reminded by reporters of his pledge after Bork's rejection to give...
...agree that his hallmark is conservatism in a quite different sense: he avoids propounding sweeping doctrines of how to interpret the Constitution. Instead, he often decides cases on the narrowest possible grounds. Says Alex Kozinski, a former Kennedy clerk and now a colleague on the Ninth Circuit bench: "Judge Bork is an academician. He has an overall theory of the law and the Constitution, and he tries to fit cases into that theory. Tony Kennedy is much more in the mold of Lewis Powell. He is a conservative and an advocate of judicial restraint, but these are simply overall principles...
...striking example of the difference: in separate cases, Bork and Kennedy ! both ruled that the Navy could dismiss homosexuals from the service, but for very different reasons. Bork took the occasion to attack a long line of Supreme Court decisions reading into the Constitution a right to privacy. Kennedy, in contrast, noted that homosexuality "might be constitutionally protected activity in some other contexts," but not in the Navy, which has a special need to maintain order among men forced into close contact with one another. He added that the regulations requiring discharge of homosexuals, though not unconstitutional given the situation...
...those cases he has generally taken a law-and-order line. For example, he upheld the death penalty for a Nevada convict, already jailed for murder, who committed another murder in prison. But Kennedy has shown sensitivity to the plight of individuals, something that critics found lacking in Bork. One case arose after police discovered drugs on an immigrant crossing the Mexican border by subjecting the man to a body-cavity search. "I remember him agonizing over that," says Kozinski. The suspect was clearly guilty, but Kennedy "felt he had been treated way below the standards for a civilized society...
Former students of Kennedy's at the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento report that he spent much class time discussing privacy cases. He gave some the impression that, unlike Bork, he does recognize a constitutionally protected right to privacy. But he seemed sympathetic when a student once argued that Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 abortion-right decision, was a political compromise, not solidly based on constitutional principles...