Two of the judges on President-elect Trump’s short list of possible Supreme Court nominees indicated over the weekend how they may, or may not, follow in the footsteps of the late Justice Antonin Scalia if they were nominated.
Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett and Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen spoke at a convention hosted by the Federalist Society, which discussed the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s past and gave some of the nominees a chance to talk about how they might fill his shoes.
Willett, for one, indicated an openness to allowing cameras in the courtroom, which would go against Scalia’s adamant opposition to this change.
“I would never presume to lecture the court on their own internal policy on cameras,” Willett told the Examiner. “We introduced cameras in our courtroom about eight or nine years ago. So for almost a decade we’ve been webcasting, and archiving for posterity, every court session and we’ve experienced none of the drawbacks that are commonly raised.”
“For us, it’s been a tremendous way to demystify this inscrutable branch of government with the black robes and the snooty Latin legalese … and I think it’s been a terrific way for us to promote a measure of transparency, acquaint people from various walks of life with the court system,” he added.
Willett didn’t say whether he would continue tweeting if appointed to the court, but he signaled no intention of stopping, and said his presence on social media has served to raise the visibility of the judicial branch and America’s “very enlightened constitutional architecture.”
Willett declined to tell the Washington Examiner whether he submitted materials for vetting by Trump’s team, following a panel he moderated on Scalia’s telecommunications legacy at the convention.
Larsen is a former Scalia law clerk who spoke at a memorial service for family, friends and Scalia clerks earlier this year, and she hosted a weekend panel on how Scalia’s writing style has affected American jurisprudence.
Larsen spoke of how her relationship with the late justice affected her work. As a Scalia disciple, she said she would likely be mindful of the late-justice’s thinking if selected to fill his seat on the court.
“Anyone, lawyer or layman alike, can read a Scalia opinion and understand what it says,” Larsen said at the convention. “His writing was precise, careful, and accessible because he believed that the greatest check, perhaps the only effective check on an insulated judiciary was the duty of the judges to explain themselves to the people in writing. I am confident that I speak for all of his former clerks when I say that when I write, I still write for him.”
Two others on Trump’s short list that spoke at the convention offered no hints into how they might approach a nomination to the high court. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., was one of them, and as of Monday, he is the second-most likely nominee under Trump, according LexPredict’s FantasySCOTUS market.
Pryor, a former attorney general of Alabama, moderated a panel on federalism and the separation of powers — foreshadowing a topic that could become a big part of any potential confirmation proceeding for him. Pryor has faced difficult confirmation processes in the past and wrote about his difficulty in getting appointed in 2003 as a U.S. circuit judge.
“That nomination was controversial for several reasons, among them my public statement as a politician that Roe v. Wade was ‘the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history,’ my defense as attorney general of an Alabama law that made sodomy a crime, and even my decision as a parent to plan a family vacation at Disney World so as not to coincide with the Gay Day festivities at the park,” Pryor wrote in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy for winter 2008.
Pryor’s entry in the Harvard Journal acknowledged that his own beliefs should not enter into the adjudication of cases in the same way it would for someone serving in one of the federal government’s political branches.
“As a judge, I am not given the authority to use a personal moral perspective to update or alter the text of our Constitution and laws,” Pryor wrote in the Harvard Journal. “The business of using moral judgment to change the law is reserved to the political branches, which is why the officers of those branches are regularly elected by the people. A judge’s task is limited to serving, in Chief Justice Roberts’s words, as an ‘umpire,’ so that controversies between citizens and officers of their government may be resolved based on the law. For that limited task, a federal judge is granted a privilege designed to secure his independence: life tenure with no reduction in salary.”
Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Thomas Hardiman was also present, and moderated a panel on labor and employment law. He has cited former Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania as an influential force in his career.
Hardiman spoke briefly with his fellow panelists about his relationship with Specter before the panel began.
“Specter, he was a brilliant man, he was a great dealmaker, he’s a brilliant guy,” Hardiman said before the panel began. “It was hard to get him for you… especially if you were young like I was. But once he was for you, once Arlen was for you, he was a junkyard dog.”
