Wise Women? What Women Bring to the Bench and How to Talk About It Like Gentlemen

The University of Georgia School of Law\u27s 28th Edith House Lecture will be delivered by Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor and legal correspondent for Slate magazine. She will present Wise Women? What Women Bring to the Bench and How to Talk About It Like Gentlemen on March 25 at 3:30 pm in the Larry Walker Room of Dean Rusk Hall, located on North Campus. According to Lithwick, the nomination and confirmation hearings of Justice Sonia Sotomayor once more put a spotlight on issues surrounding women and the law. Specifically, Sotomayor was attacked as a bully judge and also as a female exceptionalist who believed that women, specifically wise Latina women, made better decisions. During her talk, Lithwick will address the status of women and judging and will explore the question Do women really think differently than men, and if they do, is that a good thing? She will also discuss why the national conversation about women in the law is both impoverished and overheated, what women can do to change it, and what it means for the future of women on the bench and in the law. Her presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. Lithwick writes Supreme Court Dispatches and Jurisprudence in addition to covering other legal issues for Slate. Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New Republic, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Ottawa Citizen, The Washington Post and on CNN.com. She is a frequent commentator for several National Public Radio shows, including “Talk of the Nation.” She is also co-author of Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World and I Will Sing Life: Voices from the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. Before joining Slate in 1999, Lithwick practiced family law at a firm in Reno, Nev. She also served as a judicial clerk for Chief Judge Procter Ralph Hug Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Lithwick earned her undergraduate degree in English from Yale University and her Juris Doctor from Stanford University

Anthony Lewis

Tony Lewis changed everything about Supreme Court reporting. He changed everything because he inserted himself directly into the conversation between the Justices of the Supreme Court and the American public. He wasn’t writing for the constitutional scholars; he wasn’t writing for the history books (although he might have been) and he wasn’t writing to impress the justices (although he did). Instead, Lewis was a translator, an ambassador, who in the Warren Court era fashioned himself as the People’s Solicitor General; he was the advocate for the little guy before the high court, and an advocate to his readers about what the Court should be doing for the little guy. With sophisticated legal analysis and an eye for jurisprudential trends and shifts, his beat was the Constitution, as much as the Court. And as a consequence, his fingerprints are all over the doctrine he was covering

Shadow Trial: Prosecutors in Ferguson violated our right to an open criminal justice system

St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s decision to “open up” the grand jury proceedings by including massive amounts of testimony and evidence has been decried as “highly unusual,” “deeply unfair,” and evidence that police officer Darren Wilson received “special treatment.” McCulloch’s move to include a good deal of exculpatory evidence and testimony led to a three-month, closed-door proceeding that included 70 hours of testimony, including 60 witnesses and three medical examiners. The breadth of the evidence presented to the grand jury has led many to declare that it turned the entire proceeding into something that walks and quacks an awful lot like a trial, but without many of the procedural rules that would make a trial truly fair

Quick Change Justice

The architecture of the U.S. Supreme Court Building is rife with turtles. There are turtles holding up the lampposts in the courtyard and turtles engraved in the stone decor. You can buy turtle coffee mugs at the gift shop. The turtle is said to represent the slow and deliberate pace of justice. This is an institution, the turtle tells us, that moves slowly, deliberately, and removed from the knee-jerk pace of the political branches. Yet moments before they adjourned for their summer recess, the justices proved they can act quite quickly and recklessly when it comes to violating the terms of a controversial opinion they handed down only days earlier. It’s as if the loaner car the court gave us in the Hobby Lobby ruling broke down mere blocks from the shop. In an unsigned emergency order granted Thursday evening, the very same court said that this very same workaround it had just praised was also unconstitutional, that this workaround also burdened the religious freedom of religious employers. Overnight, the cure has become the disease. Having explicitly promised that Hobby Lobby would go no further than Hobby Lobby, the court went back on its word, then skipped town for the summer. This new case involves Wheaton College, an evangelical Protestant liberal arts college in Illinois. A majority of the court granted Wheaton a temporary injunction allowing it to refuse to comply with the workaround, or “accommodation,” the court had just held up as the answer in Hobby Lobby

Advice for Ferguson From the Supreme Court

This article looks at the factors regarding protestors and counselors set forth in the Supreme Court\u27s decision in McCullen v. Coakley and puts them in the Ferguson, Missouri context

The Unsung Empathy of Justice Stevens

Justice John Paul Stevens\u27 announcement of his retirement this morning has his many admirers at a loss: Liberals are already bemoaning the absence of a true liberal leader at the court—a man who could still manage to count to five to forge a majority on the sometimes fractious center-left of the court

Texas Hold ’Em - The state refuses to allow same-sex couples married elsewhere to get divorced. Is this the next constitutional showdown over marriage equality?

The court papers don’t tell us all that much about what happened between the couple described only as “J.B.” and “H.B.” We can assume there once was love and then, at some point, there wasn’t. Their parting, we’re told, was amicable. The problem is that J.B. and H.B. are both men. The other problem is that they live in Texas. The two were married in Massachusetts in 2006, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2004. They later moved to Texas, and now want to get divorced. Texas, however, won’t let them. And they cannot get divorced in Massachusetts either, because that state—like all states—has a residency requirement for divorce. On Nov. 5 the Supreme Court of Texas will hear arguments regarding whether the men’s constitutional rights are violated by not granting them a divorce. J.B. and H.B.’s case is actually one of two same-sex divorce cases now pending before the Texas Supreme Court. In a second case, the same-sex divorce was granted to a lesbian couple after a state appeals court determined that the state of Texas intervened too late

Why Obama’s Words Didn’t Go Far Enough

When President Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage, he talked broadly about “equality” and “fairness.” He spoke of “opposing discrimination against gays and lesbians” and making sure that nobody is treated as “less than full citizens when it comes to their legal rights.” It was a powerful moment—historic and emotional. In the Aaron Sorkin version, the orchestra would have soared at this point as the supporting cast members exchanged teary-eyed yet knowing nods. But then President Obama described how these rights should be protected and the music stopped with a squawk. Same-sex marriage, he said, is not in fact a federal issue but should be left to the states. The “marriage is a purely state issue” rhetoric has been around for some time. It’s become a familiar default argument, maybe because it sounds fair and feels safe. But having “evolved” this far on gay marriage, the time has come to evolve our own thinking on what is really at stake when we talk about marriage equality. We must embrace that this is a constitutional and not a democratic issue. Equality is not a popularity contest. This is hardly a radical argument. It’s Supreme Court doctrine: Our rights to be treated as equal and full citizens do not evaporate when we cross state lines. Rather there are certain essential liberties, even in the realm of marriage, we all enjoy regardless of our ZIP code

The Paradox of Justice John Paul Stevens

In the days following Justice John Paul Stevens’s death last year, numerous tributes and remembrances immediately poured forth. Former clerks, journalists, and legal scholars all grasped for the perfect words to capture the man and the justice we had just lost. Yet many readers of these tributes and homages might have begun to wonder whether they were actually all talking about the same person. Because, taken together, the various portraits appeared to be full of contradictions. In one piece, for example, Justice Stevens is described as a frequent lone dissenter, while in another he is praised for his consensusbuilding leadership. For every tribute depicting him as a moderate around whom the Court shifted rightward, there seemed to be another painting him as a jurist who drifted leftward. He was a Republican yet also a liberal giant. He was deeply patriotic, while also a sharp critic of governmental institutions. So who was the real Justice Stevens? How can we possibly be expected to understand his legacy if we can’t even agree on the basic characteristics he embodied? Which of these portraits is correct