RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/judge-jackson-wont-say-dobbs-leak-is-wrong-and-wont-object-to-protests-at-her-soon-to-be-colleagues-homes/?

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court after the current term ends in a few weeks, sat for an interview by the Washington Post. She was asked about the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in the Dobbs abortion case, and the consequent demonstrations at the homes of several justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as conservative justices identified in media reporting as having voted with Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from the interview:

Q: What was your response when you when you saw the draft leak [of a Supreme Court opinion that would strike down Roe v. Wade]?

A: Everybody who is familiar with the court and the way in which it works was shocked by that. Such a departure from normal order.

Q: Do you think it was a good thing or a bad thing?

A: I can’t answer that.

Q: What do you think about peaceful protests outside of Supreme Court justices’ homes?

A: I don’t have any comment.

This ranges from somewhere between cowardly and sinister, much like the failure of the justices to issue a joint statement that echoes the chief justice’s condemnation of the leak and statement of determination to identify the leaker, and that condemns the protests, which violate federal law.

https://www.city-journal.org/lawyers-for-radical-change

The transformation of the legal profession marks a fundamental change in American democracy. In the republic’s early days, lawyers provided ballast for stability and served as an anchor against excessive populism. The judiciary’s sober attachment to formal order was a primary reason for giving it the power to review the constitutionality of legislation. Law was the profession most likely to preserve the enduring framework of republican government against the mutable passions of the hour.

Nowadays, lawyers are a force for often-radical progressive change. Nothing symbolizes that shift better than the American Bar Association. Once an embodiment of conservatism, it has been captured by the Left. Its resolutions at its annual meeting constitute a wish list of Democratic Party proposals. It also deploys its influence in the accreditation process of law schools to make them even more monolithically left-wing than they already are.

The reasons for the shift lie, at least in part, in the reorientation of lawyers’ interests. Since the birth of the modern regulatory state, lawyers are no longer primarily the allies of commercial classes, as they were in the early republic, but instead the technocrats and enablers of regulation and redistribution. The more the nation intervenes in economic affairs to regulate and redistribute, the greater slice of compliance costs and transfer payments lawyers can expect to receive. Thus, they cannot be counted on as supporters of property rights or even of a stable rule of law. Their interest lies frequently in dynamic forms of legal transformation and the uncertainty they bring. Far from supporting a sound, established social order, they are likely to seek to undermine it. Only an ideological attachment to older forms of legal orders, like that which Federalist Society members manifest, can call lawyers back to the essential role they play in the civic life of our republic.

Today’s American Bar Association uses its accreditation power to make law schools monolithically left-wing.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18539/protesters-justices-homes

I think interfering with the personal lives of judges, whether in their homes, the restaurants they eat in, or their children’s schools, goes beyond what should be acceptable in a democracy. Such actions, even if constitutionally protected, should be condemned by decent people.

We live in an age where many, on both sides of the political spectrum, believe, and act on the belief, that noble ends justify ignoble means. That of course is a matter of degree. There may well be extreme situations where such intrusive protests might, under some circumstances, be morally acceptable. But this should not apply to protesting unjust judicial decisions of a divided court.

Most non-violent protests are constitutionally protected. Violent ones are not. And there are close cases that may turn on the specific facts, such as entering the Capitol to protest the counting of the votes of presidential electors. (I am representing one such defendant).

So I will protest the morality of those who are demonstrating in front of US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s home, while defending their right to do so peacefully and within constitutional limits.

Pro-abortion protestors have assembled in front of Justice Samuel Alito’s family home in an obvious effort to intimidate or punish him. It will not change his draft opinion regarding the overruling of Roe v. Wade, but the question arises: are such protests legal and/or desirable?