Calabresi writes:

These numbers ought to raise serious concern because of Mr. Obama's extreme left-wing views about the role of judges. He believes -- and he is quite open about this -- that judges ought to decide cases in light of the empathy they ought to feel for the little guy in any lawsuit.

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: "[W]e need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

On this view, plaintiffs should usually win against defendants in civil cases; criminals in cases against the police; consumers, employees and stockholders in suits brought against corporations; and citizens in suits brought against the government. Empathy, not justice, ought to be the mission of the federal courts, and the redistribution of wealth should be their mantra.

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A Wall Street Journal Editorial Opinion piece. This certainly should be at least as objective as anything we have seen on FoxNews or read in WorldNetDaily or NewxMax.

It's a surprisingly weak, though heart-felt, to be sure, piece of writing for so distinguished a scholar. For one, he quotes Obama out of context on the whole redistribution matter - I believe Obama was discussing how the Court never reached the issues of school funding equity in the post-Brown era. Secondly, he seems to suffer from the bizarre notion that one can have justice without empathy, compassion or mercy. If that were so, sentencings would be simple Hamurabi-like calculations. Our courts are courts of law AND equity. Heck, wasn't the much-ballyhooed *conservative* Supreme Court decision capping punitive damage awards based on part due to the awards' "cruelty?"

The response to Obama is the sadly commonplace accusation that to make sure that the too-often underprotected receive their due consideration in our legal system is to give them unfair special privileges. You ought to be ashamed of your post, John Marshall, if you believe in justice.

Can anyone be surprised by this? After all, Dahlia Lithwick has been saying the same thing for years in Slate and calling it legal analysis. "Law" is such a pale male concept; "justice" is a matter of properly redistributing wealth, power, and rights to politically favored constituencies.

Another post in this topic says that Obama will make his decisions according to the constitution. That's very nice, except that liberals like Obama believe that the constitution doesn't mean anything it actually says, its meaning is whatever liberal judges and politicians say it means in order to reach the result they desire. This is how they find no right to keep and bear arms even though it's written right there in black and white, but an ironclad right to abortion even though there's not the slightest hint of any such right, or anything remotely related to "reproductive freedom" (i.e., freedom to make somoeone else suffer the consequences of one's sexual behavior), anywhere in the document. Up is down, old is new, black is white, bearing arms is abortion, and rule of law is the whim of judge-kings.

Re: "You ought to be ashamed of your post, John Marshall, if you believe in justice."

Conservatives don't believe in Justice. Only power by whatever means possible, without regard to truth.