Saturday, July 02, 2005

 

Sandra Day O’Connor Retires

It is said that her approach to arriving at a judicial decision is to consider how a law or a change in law will affect the lives of ordinary people. This is very different from the approach of Antonin Scalia, who looks at the words of the constitution and what they meant at the time they were adopted. Of course, both Scalia and O’Connor accept precedent, or judicial decisions made in the past. Our constitution requires that American judges consider judicial decisions in England as long ago as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

My father, a wise man but no legal student, once said to me that the federal constitution is a means to an end, not an end in itself. He also said that the United States is a continuing experiment. I believe he would have approved the judicial thinking of Sandra Day O’Connor and would have disapproved that of Antonin Scalia. I can’t say how he would have reacted to the decisions of the Supreme Court and, more particularly, the opinions of O’Connor and Scalia. He died in 1973, before the controversy over Roe v. Wade, before the controversy over the Ten Commandments, before the Republican Party was taken over by the religious fundamentalists.
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