'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

The question I would ask is why it's so fashionable for nominees to suggest that the hard work of judging is simple; that the Constitution is no more complicated than the instructions for assembling an Ikea end table; and that the reason they are perfectly qualified for the job is that, well, they can read.

-- Dahlia Lithwick (above right), in a Slate commentary anticipating the hearings, set to begin next Monday, on the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan (left) to the U.S. Supreme Court. (In addition to the post above, which mentions Kagan, check out SCOTUSblog's views on Kagan-as-likely-4th-ever-woman-Justice here.)

Lithwick's question was part of her analysis of a recent speech by ex-Justice David Souter (below right). With statements like that quoted below, Souter, who retired last Term (prior posts), challenged those who claim that all constitutional questions are susceptible to a "fair reading" -- his phrase for viewpoints that others might characterize as the originalist or the umpire mode of judging:

A choice may have to be made, not because language is vague but because the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well. These paired desires of ours clash, and when they do a court is forced to choose betwen them, between one constitutional good and another one. The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice.

Courage in our Convictions

Eagle-eyed blogreaders will notice that a couple of my recent posts (here, and today, here) have been cross-posted at Convictions, the just-launched legal blog at Slate, the online magazine owned by Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. Convictions is self-described as

Slate's blogging destination for smart legal conversation and commentary. Law plays an increasingly important role in American public and private life, defining the myriad ways we interact, transact, relate and dispute with each other. We hope that, by sharing their own convictions on this blog, our contributors will help inform and shape the American conversation about law.

My co-contributors, I'm pleased to announce, include a number of women featured here in the course of this past year:

► IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Dawn Johnsen, Professor of Law and Ira C. Batman Faculty Fellow, Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington. Formerly Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, Dawn guest-posted last month on the question of investigating CIA waterboarding.

► Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., a number of whose Los Angeles Times columns we've featured.

► Dahlia Lithwick, Slate senior editor and legal writer, on whose work we've also posted.

Other women (we make up a third of the Convictions roster; not bad for the outside-the-pink-zone):

► Emily Bazelon, Slate senior editor, with a focus on health, law, and family.

► Judge Nancy Gertner, U.S. District Court, Boston, Massachusetts, who teaches at Yale Law School and practiced in Boston before joining the bench in 1993.

► Deborah Pearlstein, Visiting Scholar, Princeton University's Law and Public Affairs Program. She was the founding director of Human Rights First's Law and Security Program and a speechwriter in the White House of former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

For details on blog organizer Phillip Carter and our other distinguished male colleagues at Convictions, click here.

Capacity for outrage: Irrevocably damaged?

That's the concern voiced in "The Harm Initiative," an excellent item by Slate law columnist Dahlia Lithwick (left). She recalls having been worried that the 2004 disclosure of the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse photos would prove to be "a sort of foot in the door for looser torture standards—a way to begin desensitizing the American people to the kinds of abuse that had been going on in secret." (We've posted similar concerns about the effect of depicting violence here and here.)
Congress' loosening of standards in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 went a long way to that end, Lithwick writes. She then moves to her current concern: that "just as those images paved the way to our broader torture policy," any further information of "the CIA torture tapes now stand to do the same thing for water-boarding in particular."