This Day in Liberal Judicial Activism—September 24

Policy

President Bill Clinton speaks in the briefing room of the White House, June 16, 1998. (Gary Cameron/Reuters)

1992—By a vote of 4 to 3, the Kentucky supreme court rules (in Commonwealth v. Wasson) that Kentucky’s statutory prohibition of homosexual sodomy, dating from 1860, violates a right of privacy and a guarantee of equal treatment implicit in Kentucky’s 1891 constitution. In the words of one of the dissenting justices:

The issue here is not whether private homosexual conduct should be allowed or prohibited. The only question properly before this Court is whether the Constitution of Kentucky denies the legislative branch a right to prohibit such conduct. Nothing in the majority opinion demonstrates such a limitation on legislative prerogative.…

Perhaps the greatest mischief to be found in the majority opinion is in its discovery of a constitutional right which lacks any textual support.… When judges free themselves of constitutional text, their values and notions of morality are given free rein and they, not the Constitution, become the supreme law.

1993—President Clinton nominates This Day Hall-of-Famer Rosemary Barkett, chief justice of the Florida supreme court, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

2013—Live by the quota, die by the quota?

The New York Times reports that the Congressional Black Caucus is complaining that “out of 787 [active] federal [judicial] positions, only 95 are held by black judges.” But insofar as the Congressional Black Caucus is claiming that blacks are substantially “underrepresented” in the federal judiciary, its own statistics belie its claim.

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Let’s make the dubious assumption that the relevant benchmark for quota-mongers is the percentage of blacks in the population (rather than, say, the much lower percentage of lawyers who are black—apparently in the 4% to 5% range—or the even lower percentage of blacks among lawyers who have 15 or 20 years of qualifying legal experience).

According to 2010 population statistics, blacks make up 12.6% of the U.S. population. The Congressional Black Caucus’s numbers show that blacks hold 12.1% of active federal judgeships. That would suggest a trivial disparity—again, against a very favorable benchmark.

Less than a year later, the percentage of active federal judgeships held by blacks will exceed the percentage of blacks in the population.

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