Word: lawfulness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...done for Richard Nixon's White House in All the President's Men and The Final Days. Fortified by a $350,000 advance from Simon & Schuster, Woodward and Armstrong spent two years reading cases and interviewing Justices and more than 170 former court clerks, top-level law school graduates who serve as confidential aides for a year or two. The sources not only supplied the authors with blow-by-blow descriptions of the court's in camera deliberations during the first seven years (1969-76) of Burger's tenure but also made available a number...
...table and shouted, "Jesus Christ, here we go again!" The chief is portrayed as a legal lightweight whose opinions are shoddy and poorly thought out. Of one Burger opinion dealing with court-ordered school busing in Detroit, Justice Lewis Powell is quoted as saying, "If an associate in my law firm had done this, I'd fire him." Fickle and unprincipled, the authors claim, Burger is a jurist who can write, a very liberal opinion on race discrimination, just so that his critics cannot easily pigeonhole him as a conservative. He is certainly no leader. "On ocean liners," Justice...
...often, however, the politicking and personal enmities depicted in The Brethren obscure what the Justices are really struggling with: the application of the law and the Constitution to complex moral and social questions like abortion, obscenity, busing, the death penalty. The notion that such issues can be considered solely in terms of abstract and impersonal principle is, of course, a myth. Inevitably there are times when the Justices end up 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...
...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 a "D" to a "B" by law school grading standards, but the incident showed that the court has internal checks and balances. Lobbying by outsiders is shown to be futile. When the Washington lawyer and Franklin Roosevelt brain-truster Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran visited his old friend Black and acquaintance Brennan to get a controversial antitrust...
...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 pragmatic rather than principled decisions-shading the facts, twisting the law, warping logic to reconcile the unreconcilable." Even if it was not what Stevens had anticipated, the book says, "it was the reality...