The Corruption of the Law
ISLE AU HAUT, Maine—I drink coffee in the morning on a round, ornate
oak table that once belonged to Harlan Fiske Stone, a U.S. Supreme Court
justice from 1925 to 1946 and the chief justice for the last five of
those years. Stone and his family spent their summers on this windswept,
remote island six miles off the coast of Maine.
Stone, a Republican and close friend of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert
Hoover, embodied a lost era in American politics. His brand of
conservatism, grounded in the belief that the law is designed to protect
the weak from the powerful, bears no resemblance to that of the
self-proclaimed “strict constitutionalists” in the Federalist Society
who have accumulated tremendous power in the judiciary. The Federalist
Society, at the behest of President Trump, is in charge of vetting the
108 candidates for the federal judgeships that will be filled by the
administration. The newest justice, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, comes
out of the Federalist Society, as did Justices Clarence Thomas, John
Roberts and Samuel Alito. The self-identified “liberals” in the
judiciary, while progressive on social issues such as abortion and
affirmative action, serve corporate power as assiduously as the
right-wing ideologues of the Federalist Society. The Alliance for Justice
points out that 85 percent of President Barack Obama’s judicial
nominees—280, or a third of the federal judiciary—had either been
corporate attorneys or government prosecutors. Those who came out of
corporate law firms accounted for 71 percent of the nominees, with only 4
percent coming from public interest groups and the same percentage
having been attorneys who represented workers in labor disputes.
Harlan Fiske Stone's conservatism was grounded in the belief that the law is designed to protect the weak from the powerful. (Mr. Fish)
