Posted by Orin Kerr:
Now and Then:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_24-2009_05_30.shtml#1243387736
Dahlia Lithwick, [1]The Rational Hysterics, today:
Confirmation hearings are inevitably an invitation to behave badly.
Something about the bright lights of the Senate judiciary committee
brings out the worst in people. Legal thinkers who are otherwise
reasonable and intelligent somehow become great big puddles of
snarling, hateful id. I think Democrats made a mistake when they
accused Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito of
being misogynists and racists at their confirmation hearings. And
Republicans are poised to make the same mistake when they attack
Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. . . .
Dahlia Lithwick, [2]John Roberts' Woman Problem, August 19, 2005:
Score one for Bruce Reed. He picked up on what I completely missed
this week: that the most telling aspect of Supreme Court nominee
John Roberts' adolescence was not his staunch refusal to get high
in the woods, but his contempt for all things female. . . .
Yesterday's info dump from the National Archives, raining down more
than 38,000 pages of memos from Roberts' service as a legal adviser
in the Reagan White House from 1982-86, suggests that Reed has the
better of it. . . . What's truly is shocking is his dismissive
tone, which seemed to surprise even ultraconservative Phyllis
Schlafly, who described it yesterday as "smart alecky." Gender
disparities are invariably "perceived" or "purported," in Roberts'
eyes. Every effort to solve them is laughable. At a moment when
serious inequities in women's wages, employment, and opportunities
existed in this country, Roberts seemed to dismiss every attempt to
remedy them as a knock-knock joke. . . . .
Does all this add up to John Roberts, woman-hater?
Elliot Mincberg, senior vice president of People for the American
Way, told the Chicago Tribune today, "You do see a real clear lack
of regard for�and even it could be argued, hostility toward�laws
and theories and arguments that would promote equality for women in
important ways." And Kim Gandy, president of NOW, fumed in the same
paper: "I don't see Roberts' positions as conservative. ... I know
a lot of conservatives who expect women to be paid fairly, who
think women should become lawyers if they want to be lawyers. That
is not a conservative position, that is a Neanderthal position.
It's unfair to conservatives to call the positions he takes
conservative."
References
1. http://www.slate.com/id/2219038/
2. http://www.slate.com/id/2124789/
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