Word: courtly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...voting their own convictions. "Result oriented" jurisprudence such as this has been criticized for years. But a Justice has to persuade his colleagues to produce a five-man majority; votes change and compromises are struck as individual opinions are exposed to the often withering scrutiny of the whole court. Ego clashes are not surprising, nor are they unique to just the Burger Court. Indeed, insiders consider this court less fractious than some of its predecessors...
Again and again in The Brethren, blatant ploys or power plays by individual Justices are thwarted by the court as a whole. A poorly reasoned opinion by one Justice is hammered into something coherent and justifiable by others. During the Watergate crisis, when Burger took the court's decision on the Nixon tapes case for himself and botched it, the other Justices conspired to wrest the actual writing of the opinion away from the chief and inserted their own judgments into the final draft. True, Stewart scoffed that the final product had been edited from...
Such examples of institutional strength help offset the Justices' idiosyncrasies. "You sure can get the impression from the book that the court is an institution that works," says Co-Author Woodward. "There is strong evidence both ways. But we made a scrupulous effort to be non-judgmental." Indeed, the authors use a "just-the-facts-Ma'am" style; though the facts are not attributed, they novelistically include the Justices' innermost thoughts. In the book's final pages, Justice Stevens ponders his first year (1976) on the court. He finds himself "accustomed to watching his colleagues make...
...father, for instance, is crucified for criticizing the government. Joseph's family has come down in the world, its ancestral wealth having been snatched from it by greedy King Herod. Joseph has been an anti-Roman terrorist. When Mary claims to be pregnant with the Messiah, a Jewish court sentences her to death by stoning. In the nick of time, Joseph intervenes to save her, accepting the paternity of the child and a flogging in her stead...
While the number of languid non-believers in America is legion, the number of aggressive atheists is small, probably no larger than the 65,000 claimed for Archatheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair's mailing list. The number of atheists willing to go to court about religion is smaller still. One of these is a South Dakota laborer named Roger Florey...