Who Am I to Judge?: Judicial Craft versus Constitutional Theory
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Senators at recent confirmation hearings have asked nominees about their commitments to originalism and their judicial philosophies. This lecture, based on a forthcoming book, argues that we should shift our focus. Retrospectively examining “great” Supreme Court justices and “strong” (and “weak”) Supreme Courts, I suggest that we should be looking for justices with broad human experience and intellectual curiosity: Rather than asking what a nominee’s judicial philosophy is or which Supreme Court justices she or he admires, perhaps Senators should ask, “What’s your favorite novel and movie ? What’s the best recent novel and movie that you’ve seen?”
This event will be recorded and made available on the Stanford Constitutional Law YouTube Channel a few days after the event.
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Mark Tushnet Harvard Law School Professor Tushnet, who graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School and served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, specializes in constitutional law and theory, including comparative constitutional law. His research includes studies of constitutional review in the United States and around the world, and the creation of other “institutions for protecting constitutional democracy.” He also writes in the area of legal and particularly constitutional history, with works on the development of civil rights law in the United States and a history of the Supreme Court in the 1930s.
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