One facet of Sotomayor’s personality that some criticize but that I find a big, big plus is her apparent refusal to value “collegiality”—a trait whose benefit mostly inures to the judges themselves and that sometimes consciously interferes with honest judging—above all else. This is in stark contrast to Diane Wood, who wouldn’t be caught dead not proverbially scratching the back of one of her colleagues. (As in the old saying, “I’ll scratch your back and you’ll scratch mine.”)

And in fact was not. When several years ago a litigant criticized her colleague Ilana Rovner—who is quoted in the linked-to article as singing the praises of collegiality among the members of her court, as though this attribute, serves the public’s interest rather than the personal interests of the judges, and who I now learn introduced Wood to her current husband—for having failed to recuse herself because of a conflict of interest concerning her son’s employment at the time and for having failed even to disclose the conflict, Wood threatened sanctions against the litigant for impugning Rovner’s integrity. (By then, oddly enough, Rovner had recused herself from the case (without stating a reason for doing so), but the damage already was done.

By the time she recused herself, the case was on appeal for the second time, three years after the first appeal.) But the core principle of collegiality-as-legal-doctrine is that the judicial office is freely used to protect the personal interests of colleagues. After all, the collegial judge never knows when she herself might need the benefits of that custom. (And yes, had Wood been nominated instead of Sotomayor, the matter would have received some public attention. You betcha.)

she was a freaking prosecutor for the state of New York, which means she prosecuted and supported the prosecution of citizens under some of the most tyranicaly drug laws in the nation. From my persecptive, having an understanding of how states attorneys operate, no prosecutor should ever rise to the bench, they should be considered to have failed the moral turpitude test......

Change the laws.

lots and lots of laws ahould be changed, we should quit trying to legislate morality......

1. And until the laws are changed, the people whose business is law-enforcement are duty-bound to enforce them. Period. You peddling moral-relativist twaddle about which laws deserve enforcement and which don't will never change that-- and shouldn't.

2. If you think drug laws are about "morality" you aren't paying attention. Drug abuse is at the very least a public-health issue and in many cases much more than that, as the accompanying/companion crimes justify attendant law-enforcement.

Those who lack morality and ethics should enforce tyranical laws and the reich proved there are many of this ilk around. It is seldom the moral relativist who is the problem but the moral absolutist who brings the world to grief, from the crucifiction of christ to the gassing of the Jews, all done with concise moral clarity.

The logic of the prohibitionist is always amusing, it's the booze not the laws that cause lawlessness. It would seem that in a nation that boasts of freedom and liberty one might suspect something is terribly wrong when they jail more citizens then the worst of the repressive nations, no?

Drug use is a public health iussue, wow, and here I thought my body was mine not the publics. Understand I haven't taken a toke in over 25 years but that does not mean I am not horrified to see the way we treat drug users in this nation, how the drug laws themselves undermine the very foundation of freedom and liberty, from search laws to militarization of the internal police forces to the asset forfiture, drug laws have chipped away at our nations core......

"Drug use is a public health iussue, wow, and here I thought my body was mine not the publics"

You may not have taken a toke in over 25 years, but it appears you are nevertheless wildly disconnected from reality. Visit any large urban hospital, any small rural treatment clinic, the counseling office at any public school, any job-training or -placement program you choose and you just might learn that-- your bizarre understanding of the notion of "liberty" aside-- there is a point at which your individual free actions nevertheless become my right concern.

It's called growing up; look into it.

when they infringe upon your person or property, it's part of that bizzare concept of liberty espoused by Locke and Rousseau and later by Mills. When the social contract breaks down and the government declares war upon the citizens we can pretty much consider the contract void.

Yes like most prohibionists you see the ills of prohibition and blame the prohibitited product. You see that the man in the unemployment office who can't get a job because he has a drug arrest record or kid in the counselors office because unregulated drug distribution puts drugs on the street and the small rural treatment center where users have resorted to bathtub gin (meth) and you fail to see the core cause. It's not the product it's the lack of control that only legaliztion can bring. After 30 plus years it's time to for the state to admit it has lost the war and reconcile with it's citizens.

And yes I do believe fools have the right to be fools and I nor you are their keeper.......

"When the social contract breaks down and the government declares war upon the citizens..."

Government hell-- when your shit leaks over into my house, expect me to put it back where it belongs... with the assistance of my paid public servants, if need be. Your assumption that there is some kind of disembodied "government" that is declaring war on individuals by enforcing laws the community has elected is sophomoric at best.

And while we're on the subject of your assumptions, I'm not a prohibitionist, boob-- I think we should legalize drugs.

Addiction and abuse and the medical and social ills that accompany them-- along with the attendant personal and property crime you so determinedly ignore-- are not results of the prohibition or control of substances. As much as you want to selectively detail what you'll find in the places I suggested, you know perfectly well what I mean about "costs"... or else you're more enthusiastically intellectually dishonest than first appeared.

Next specious "argument?"

Wolf,

The Rockefeller laws, which were the original topic of this rantfest (rant and counter-rant), were a cynical attempt on the part of Nelson Rockefeller to make himself look Presidential by being tougher on crime than anybody else. The right wing of the party turned him down anyway, and he had to wait for Nixon to implode before he got anywhere close to the Presidency. Too bad, so sad. All those guys at Attica died for nothing.

Since everyone's in favor of legalization, I won't preach to the choir on that topic.

I just wish we had more sane and sensible laws with respect to the treatment of chronic pain. My father died in hideous, constant pain. I was able, after he went into hospice care, to get him enough morphine to knock out most of the pain, but at the cost of nearly putting him into a coma. I could have managed his pain a lot better with heroin, but we don't use heroin medically because it's EVIL or something.

It would be nice if our drug laws really WERE public health laws, but there's an aspect of them that just responds to religious hysteria. Oh damn, preaching to the choir again. Sorry.

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An Open Letter to Bill Bennett
by Milton Friedman, April 1990

In Oliver Cromwell's eloquent words, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" about the course you and President Bush urge us to adopt to fight drugs. The path you propose of more police, more jails, use of the military in foreign countries, harsh penalties for drug users, and a whole panoply of repressive measures can only make a bad situation worse. The drug war cannot be won by those tactics without undermining the human liberty and individual freedom that you and I cherish.

You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us. You are not mistaken in believing that the majority of the public share your concerns. In short, you are not mistaken in the end you seek to achieve.

Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

I append excerpts from a column that I wrote in 1972 on "Prohibition and Drugs." The major problem then was heroin from Marseilles; today, it is cocaine from Latin America. Today, also, the problem is far more serious than it was 17 years ago: more addicts, more innocent victims; more drug pushers, more law enforcement officials; more money spent to enforce prohibition, more money spent to circumvent prohibition.

Had drugs been decriminalized 17 years ago, "crack" would never have been invented (it was invented because the high cost of illegal drugs made it profitable to provide a cheaper version) and there would today be far fewer addicts. The lives of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent victims would have been saved, and not only in the U.S. The ghettos of our major cities would not be drug-and-crime-infested no-man's lands. Fewer people would be in jails, and fewer jails would have been built.

Columbia, Bolivia and Peru would not be suffering from narco-terror, and we would not be distorting our foreign policy because of narco-terror. Hell would not, in the words with which Billy Sunday welcomed Prohibition, "be forever for rent," but it would be a lot emptier.

Decriminalizing drugs is even more urgent now than in 1972, but we must recognize that the harm done in the interim cannot be wiped out, certainly not immediately. Postponing decriminalization will only make matters worse, and make the problem appear even more intractable.

Alcohol and tobacco cause many more deaths in users than do drugs. Decriminalization would not prevent us from treating drugs as we now treat alcohol and tobacco: prohibiting sales of drugs to minors, outlawing the advertising of drugs and similar measures. Such measures could be enforced, while outright prohibition cannot be. Moreover, if even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to the users could be dramatic.

This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes "on suspicion" can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.

Nice post, LeRoy-- thanks.

I'm sorry to hear about your dad, Ox. Good you could be there for him, shame you couldn't do more. I know that feeling; mine at least went quietly and without pain, but the feelings, that struggle between being able to be there and not being able to really do anything, that never seems to end.

I don't always agree with Milton Friedman, but I do on this particular issue.

That Milton Freidman letter really stuns me. I’d always thought of Friedman as a reflexive conservative ideologue. But now I see that he was simply a libertarian.

It’s hard to reconcile his libertarian brand of conservatism with the Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito brand, which is a sort of soft variety of fascism (without the Nazism part of that ideology). They seem to favor the concept of a police state—at heart the very antithesis of Friedman’s across-the-board libertarianism.