Judicial Ethics

I feel like it's not very often when a judge gets into ethical trouble for social reasons.  Generally, by the time a person has made it to being a judge, especially a federal judge (who must be nominated and vetted by the two other branches of the federal government), that person has learned the general rules of what to do and what not to do.  George C. Paine, a bankruptcy judge in Nashville, Tennessee, has just been reprimanded by the Sixth Circuit for being a member of a country club that does not have any full women or black members who have voting rights.  In fact, women are offered the chance to be a "lady member" for a lower price, but that lower membership carries no voting rights.  A woman raised this issue of Judicial Ethics, and the Sixth Circuit responded.  Now, in Nashville, various members of the bar who have judicial aspirations are dropping their membership to this exclusive club to ensure that they are not branded as racist or misogynistic.  The club refuses to comment, but someone with sufficient power (yes, because that's not vague) has told a judge that the club will be changing and that it has a very promising black candidate.  We're in 2011, and we're still dealing with letting blacks and women into a club . . . perhaps by next year, the Belle Meade Country Club will decide to jump about fifty years and join us in the twenty-first century.

To read more, see http://www.tennessean.com/article/20111221/NEWS03/312210083/Judges-question-Belle-Meade-Country-Club-membership-after-colleague-s-reprimand?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE

Death penalty decreasing

Just a couple of links from this past week that discuss how the death penalty is being used less frequently in the US and how one law professor believes that the death penalty is coming to an end:

http://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/us-death-sentences-and-executions-are-decreasing

http://news.blogs.wlu.edu/2011/12/18/decrease-in-u-s-executions-points-to-eventual-abolishment-says-wl-law-professor/

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, it just seems like a bad policy to go around lawfully taking people's lives when evidence has repeatedly shown that we incarcerate and execute innocent citizens.  

A new picture of our author, Ella

Just to be fair, I had to post a new picture of Ella the dog:

This is how she analyzes students' papers and legal cases.  She is a dogged editor.  hahahaha!

Henry Hong, the North American black dog

Late September 2011, a black dog wandered after Ella and me on our walk.  Because I'm a sucker for animals in need, he is now a part of our family.  Meet Henry Hong.

 That is him wearing a blanket as a shawl.

This is what he does to help me work from home.  

Good paragraph from The Cellist of Sarajevo

While in New York this past weekend, I read the book The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.  The novel follows four characters throughout the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990's.  It is certainly not uplifting, but Galloway did an amazing job of relating their stories and telling them from a noticeably-Eastern European point of view.  The book begins with this great paragraph, and it actually repeats the paragraph several times:

It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort.  A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity.  There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were.  Then the visible world exploded.


I think this paragraph is so moving because it really captures the essence of "before" a particular (and, in this case, devastating) experience and "after" it.  In the novel, Galloway is talking about the bombing of the Sarajevo Opera Hall.  While I've never experienced the bombing of something precious to me, I know that when certain events are scheduled to happen or just spontaneously happen, that I will be or have become different from that point forward.  For scheduled events, they have been mundane things like my birthday or stressful events like the results of the bar exam.  Spontaneous events included 9/11 and hearing that my mom had advanced cancer.  Meeting between something scheduled and something spontaneous, I remember driving to Ohio in October 2009 and thinking to myself, "I am going to watch my mom die.  When I am on these roads again, my mom will be dead.  I will have crossed over."  I think that idea of identifying the moments of when life was "normal" and when it has become "something else" is a perfectly Newtonian human response -- I want to stay in motion the way I was in motion, or I want to stay at rest the way I was at rest.  Then, because of the change, we must grieve.  In Galloway's book, the characters spend their time grieving for the way life used to be -- when it was recognizable -- and they seek whatever comforts can give them even a moment's peace remembering that previous life.  Perhaps that longing is part of our penitence for being human.  

Mississippi Abortion Amendment Fails

I wrote this entry awhile ago, but because I am technologically-challenged and could not figure out how to sign into my blog (because of the new formatting), I am only now posting it.

I, for one, am breathing a huge sigh of relief that the voters of Mississippi rejected Proposition 26 yesterday.  Proposition 26 sought to end all abortions and cloning by redefining the start of life.  (See Justice Potter Stewart’s remarks during the Roe v. Wade oral arguments).  Specifically, it said:

Be it Enacted by the People of the State of Mississippi: SECTION 1. Article III of the constitution of the state of Mississippi is hereby amended BY THE ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION TO READ: Section 33. Person defined. As used in this Article III of the state constitution, "The term 'person' or 'persons' shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof." This initiative shall not require any additional revenue for implementation.

As pointed out by blogger Burns Strider, several influential policy-shaping groups that would normally represent opposing viewpoints came together on this issue and advocated against it.  See  Burns Strider, 6 Reasons Mississippians Said No to “Personhood” Amendment, The Huffington Post, generally available at www.thehuffingtonpost.com, accessed Nov. 9, 2011.  Strider points to the joining of (1) physicians and medical groups, (2) clergy (including the Catholic Bishop), (3) The Governor, who said he would vote for it but acknowledged having multiple concerns about the issue [sounds like lip service to me], (4) the Mississippi NAACP, and (5) Mississippians for Health Families [Strider said this was the faction that organized the opponents and drove the grassroots movement].  As I’ve pointed out in previous blogs, when normally-opposing factions are able to join forces for a particular (and often very narrowly-tailored) purpose, surprising policy outcomes develop.  For example, think of how the global community (which wasn’t exactly known for its racial tolerance) joined with Martin Luther King, Jr’s movement once he wrote Letter from a Birmingham Jail to put pressure on the US government about its blatant injustices.  [As a head’s up, this joining of normally polarized forces is currently happening in Pennsylvania and New York where the environmentalists and the more conservative hunters are joining to oppose hydraulic fracturing, i.e. “fracking, which they believe is poisoning the local water and subsequently killing deer, among other effects.  For an article explain fracking in Pennsylvania and New York and the ensuing public policy debates, see Elizabeth Kolbert, Burning Love, The New Yorker, Dec. 5, 2011.]  Thus, it is not surprising that when these groups, which appealed to different parts of the Mississippi citizenry, combined around one issue they succeeded.  Obviously what is astounding is that such groups were able to join together in what has become a polarized political atmosphere, especially around the issue of abortion. 

                  From a legal standpoint, there are several disconcerting issues with the proposed amendment.  First, it is to be an amendment in the constitution – constitutions define how a government works and how the body of people exists, both in relation to other bodies of people and internally, how the people within the body relate to one another.  To change a constitution and “define life,” as this proposed amendment does is to interject politics and religious belief into what is supposed to be a time-less, and therefore apolitical, document.  Second, the proposal has been notoriously criticized for not providing an exception for the mother’s life.  Rather, it seeks to eliminate abortion by making it a felony, in all cases.  Thus, the Justice Connors’s concern in Planned Parenthood v. Casey about the potential dangers women faced when pregnant and in abusive relationships would no longer be protected.  Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 887-94 (1992).  Expanding that critique, opponents were certainly correct when the law did not allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest.  The proponents responded that abortion is never permissible, regardless of the circumstances.  This, in effect, forces the independent mother to continue being a victim of the crime and abuse already levied against her. 

                  Overall, it is promising that the voters of Mississippi, a relatively conservative state, recognized the need to keep abortion politics out of the state’s constitution.