The Kind of Judge We Need by Linda Greenhouse
Patricia Wald was not an ambitious careerist but a lawyer who had lived a full life before joining the federal bench.
'“Why do judges write?” Judge Patricia Wald asked in a 1995 article. “Why do we not simply decree results in individual cases and, as necessary, announce broader commandments about what the law requires?”
Judge Wald, who at the time was a former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, proceeded to answer her own questions. Explaining “why we decide as we do,” she wrote, was “one of the few ways we have to justify our power.” Further, a written opinion demonstrates “our recognition that under a government of laws, ordinary people have a right to expect that the law will apply to all citizens alike.” Published in The University of Chicago Law Review, the article, titled “The Rhetoric of Results and the Results of Rhetoric,” is a classic of the literature on judicial behavior. I ask my students every year to read it.
Every judicial generation has a few select members who, despite never making it to the Supreme Court, cast a long shadow by virtue of the persuasiveness of their opinions, the power of their personality, or the respect they command from both bench and bar. All those descriptions applied to Patricia Wald. After her death last week at 90, obituary writers bestowed on her the well-deserved label of judicial pioneer: one of fewer than a dozen women in her Yale Law School class, the first woman to serve on her important court, the first to be its chief judge.
My focus here is a bit different. Contemplating her long life of public service, what strikes me is how her biography differs from those of the ambitious young men — and a few women — who are ascending to positions of judicial responsibility in the present era. Serving as a federal judge for only 20 years of a professional life that extended across seven decades, Patricia Wald lived fully not only in the law but in the world.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/patricia-wald.html?
