"Judging Is Different from Politics"

These were some of the words (or something close to some of the words) of the new Chief Justice of the SCOTS, John Roberts, after being sworn in. Ideally, I would like him to be right, but the truth is something closer to "Judging should not be like politics." Politicians are accountable to the people. While judges should also be, to an extent, ultimately, their highest accountability is actually to the law and to reason, and putting the two together. Of course they will frequently be driven by their own opinions, idealogies, and public opinion, a good judge should, as much as possible, try to put those aside, and judge each case according to the facts and applying what they see as the logical application of the law to those facts.

I was listening to the and interview with retiring Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court today. She talked about how on the state court, there really are no blocks the way there are on the SCOTUS. On one case, a judge may side passionately with one side, while on the very next, completely different groups sharing opinions may form. This is not as often the case on the US court. You can bet money that over time, certain judges will side with each other, and given a number of cases, you can put money on what way a justice will vote on each one, and over time, you'll make money. I wondered why this is. To me, the answer seems to be that in Washington, judging has become too much like politics. Look at the questions that were asked of Roberts. So many of them were asking him to essentially pre-judge cases. They were asking him to state his opinions on certain issues before he ever took the bench. Sometimes, when asking about our most general and fundamenta rights, it is fine to ask a jurist where he or she stands. We don't want supreme court justices who will overturn the first ammendment because they aren't of the opinion that it is good, for instance. But for the most part, you shouldn't ask a judge about his or her idealogies. The senators asking those questions would claim that they were asking them to ensure that the candidate would not be idealogically driven, but in reality what they were trying to figure out is if the idealogy that would drive him would align with theirs or not. They want to see if the candidate will be on their sidw when they take the bench. This is the wrong way to go about it. It will only ensure that we do get judges that are driven by their personal feelings and idealogies. It ensures that we get judges who will not judge the facts of a case according to the law, but according to their personal opinions. While I don't know if Roberts will make a good justice or not because so much of the focus, in hearings and in the media, was on his idealogy, rather than his reasoning and his ability to apply the law disinterestedly, I commend him for refusing to give in to the sentate's desire to create an idealogically drive judiciary. I agree with his statement for which I named this post. I hope he sticks to it and keeps his idealogy off the bench as best he can.

Edit: Originally, the title of this post was "Judging Is Not Like Politics" Which turned out to be a misquote, as I suspected:

Roberts said the Senate's bipartisan vote for him was "confirmation of what is for me a bedrock principle — that judging is different from politics."

Filed in: Thoughts Law SCOTUS Roberts

Not sTux with Windows Anymore

I finally installed linux on my computer. After a few setbacks, I managed to figure it out. Odd that I should have had any setbacks since Ubuntu, the linux distro I decided to go with is often said to be quite user friendly. It even bills itself as linux for human beings. Anyway, I persisted, and managed to install it successfully on my computer. I haven't completely gotten rid of windows yet, though. I can now boot into either WinXP or Ubuntu. But now I am no longer stuck with only using windows. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I should be updating more frequently. I waited this long because I did not want to have to make a post without being able to proclaim that I had installed windows, as I had said that I was going to. So now that I have installed it, I can make all the posts I care to.

Filed in: Meta Tech Linux

Rejoice

After a brief hiatus, I am back. I attend school at the University of Minnesota and live on campus, and they decided that in order to use the internet, I had to get some updates. When I attempted to install them, I could not. I got an error message that said "access denied." Nothing else. So I spent a good couple days trying to get that to work. Then I figured something must be pretty messed up on my computer, so I had to reformat my hard drive. Then I spent a couple days getting my computer somewhere close to they way it was before. So now I am back.

It turns out that I had a bug on my computer. It is known as "Microsoft Windows XP." It turns out that there are many bug fixes for this problem. So anyway, in order to get the updates in question, service pack 2, to install, I had to reformat my hard drive. I considered just installing linux instead of Windows, or partitioning my hard drive to dual boo, but decided instead to just buy another hard drive and load linux on that. So I have managed to get windows to work for now, but I have my new hard drive, and will soon have linux on it, and will then no longer have to deal with this most ingenious of computer viruses, which infects the vast majority of home computers, known as windows, when I don't want to.

Filed in: Meta Tech Microsoft Linux