Scouring Obama’s Past for Clues on Judiciary

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Scouring Obama’s Past for Clues on Judiciary

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: May 9, 2009


WASHINGTON — As a freshman senator, Barack Obama accused one of President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees of changing her approach from case to case to ensure outcomes favorable to powerful parties, like property owners. That one-sided record, he said, showed a mission of “not blind justice, but political activism.”

But in another floor speech soon afterward, Mr. Obama seemed to emphasize a different ideal than blind justice. Judges should “recognize who the weak are and who the strong are in our society,” he said, because hard cases will turn on factors like “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

Today, as President Obama prepares to select a Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice David H. Souter, who is retiring, scholars and activists are confronting such contradictions as they scour his brief senatorial record for clues to his judicial philosophy.

As a constitutional law teacher, Mr. Obama gained a reputation as a pragmatist who sometimes challenged liberal orthodoxies. But as a senator who came to Washington in 2005 already being mentioned as a potential Democratic presidential candidate, he assembled a nearly uniformly liberal voting record on judges.

In a chamber with 44 Democrats, for example, he was one of 22 senators to vote against confirming John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice and one of 25 to go along with an attempt to block a vote on Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/us/politics/10court.html?ref=us

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1. A NY Times article

May 2, 2009 As a Professor, Obama Held Pragmatic Views on Court

also July 30, 2008
Inside Professor Obama’s Classroom
We’ve asked four legal experts to take a look at then-Professor Barack Obama’s course materials and offer some insight into what they say about Mr. Obama’s teaching methods, priorities and approach to the Constitution.