Instapundit links to a Profslawblog post arguing for Seventh Circuit judge Richard Posner as a Supreme Court appointment. Certainly, Judge Posner is the most qualified man for the job on credentials and intellectual accomplishment alone, moreso even than, say, Ken Starr or Laurence Tribe or his Seventh Circuit colleague Frank Easterbrook. My sense is that this would make Posner an attractive candidate if Bush faced the need for a compromise a down the road. But I have no doubt that Posner would not be his first pick, particularly due to his age.
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Posner is qualified for Supreme Court, and I could live with him if he was balanced out with Tribe. I love reading Posner’s opinions, even if he is conservative. I wish the judges in my Circuit wrote like that. Ken Starr will never make it the Supreme Court in light of his pornography treatise published in 1998. The most qualified person for the Court is almost never nominated as presidents appoint people for political reasons. Stevens was probably the last person appointed to the Court who ranked among the 5 most qualified candidates. Rehnquist, O’Connor and Thomas were wild-card picks and each of them would be obscure judges/lawyers today but for the incredible fortune thrust upon them.
One “no” vote for Posner here on ideological grounds. Back in the late 80s, I was friends with a guy who played a fairly important role in the judicial selection process in the late second term of Reagan. I asked him how they could have put Posner on the bench. He answered: Don’t blame me; it was before my time.
I have zero complaints about Posner as a 7th Circuit judge; he’s a great judge, and probably does conservatism more good where he is, given his role in shaping procedural and commercial law, which would be more circumscribed given the limits of the Court’s docket. I’d be more hesitant with him on the Supreme Court, where Constitutional and/or social issues are much more prominent.
I’d be shocked if Posner got the nod. He’s written too many articles and books and opinions. Even putting aside the “baby selling” thing, there’s just too much ammunition in his body of work.
The main obstacle wouldn’t come from liberals, but rather from social conservatives.
There is absolutely no way that Bush gives social conservatives the middle finger and nominates Posner.
This is just daydreaming from law nerds (of which I am one).
Posner would be a great choice but he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in that very hot hot place.
He’s got a paper trail as wide as five interstates, and its full of road kill that would indeed enrage social conservative (as Geek, Esq, said) as much as other stuff would enrage liberals.
Right here on my desk I’ve got a paper of his making the case that polygamy is good for women, and also to reduce economic equality, while the one-wife-per-husband rule is imposed by men at the cost of women. And he’s correct too, at least as far as his logic goes*. But how would this play at a confirmation hearing? Multiply by 200.
(* To wit: If five women voluntarily marry Warren Buffett, then it’s because they think they are better off doing so and sharing his billions than each having a poor workaday shlub all to herself — and as the five and their kids divvy up Warren’s estate, they will divide and reduce it much faster than one wife will. But as this would leave four workaday shlubs like me wifeless, we get together to outvote Warren to impose a one-wife-at-a-time rule.
Posner says it is curious to think monogamy laws are passed for the benefit of women at the cost of men when they have unversally been enacted in societies before women got the vote. Why would men be so altruistic?)