Word: lower-court
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...federal benches than all previous Presidents combined. Some observers have consequently questioned whether he is more concerned with diversity than merit, but C.I.J. Organizer Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment lawyer, maintains that most of his appointees are "extraordinarily highly qualified." During his Administration, Congress has created 152 additional lower-court judgeships. "With that many new judges the tendency should have been for lower quality: a few bright lights, then politics as usual," says Thomas Susman of the Senate Judiciary Committee staff. "That isn't what Carter's done. We had more bright lights than...
...another key decision, the U.S. Supreme Court last week affirmed a lower-court ruling that rejected a plan to bus children between Atlanta's predominantly black schools and the mainly white institutions in nine surrounding suburban districts. The decision, which was not accompanied by a written opinion outlining the court's reasoning, was a blow to the flagging hopes of school-integration supporters that the Justices might be receptive to cross-district busing plans now before various federal courts. The advocates argue such broader plans are necessary because the white flight to the suburbs has left central-city...
What worried the four dissenters was the likelihood that some lower-court judges will take Rehnquist at his word and begin closing off courtrooms for no good reason. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for himself and Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Byron White, accused the court of overreacting to the risks of prejudicial publicity in the Clapp murder case. News articles about the case were "placid, routine and innocuous," wrote Blackmun. "There was no screaming headline, no lurid photograph, no front-page overemphasis." Nonetheless, the court "reached for a strict and flat result," he said, an "inflexible rule" that ignores...
Last month, however, ABC Correspondent Tim O'Brien reported that the court was about to rule that a journalist's state of mind could be probed in libel suits (the court so ruled two days later). O'Brien afterward disclosed that a lower-court decision involving prisoners' rights would be reversed (the ruling has not yet been announced). Chief Justice Warren Burger was so upset over O'Brien's leaks that he did some detective work. The result: last week John A. Tucci, a Government Printing Office employee who sets Supreme Court rulings...
Just five days after its ruling on the "reverse discrimination" complaint of the medical school applicant Allan Bakke, the Supreme Court last week turned to the no less controversial issue of affirmative action in the field of employment. In contrast to the Bakke decision, in which six Justices filled 154 pages with occasionally passionate legal arguments, the court simply let stand-without explanation-a lower-court ruling that approved numerical goals for employment and promotion of minorities and women...