---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: intelligence and judging
From:    [log in to unmask]
Date:    Fri, October 14, 2005 8:16 am
To:      "Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) Talk"
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The thread has taken a turn into HLS, LSAT, HLR and other acronymns but I
return to the suggestion that intelligence ought to be the primary Supreme
Court qualification.  Maybe it is sour grapes or my inability to
comprehend, but I don't agree.

I clerked for our Court of Appeals.  Despite my lavish youthful idealism
at the time, I learned the meaning of "you don't want to know how laws and
sausages are made."

In 2001-02, I worked at the US Supreme Court and sat in on virtually all
the oral arguments of that Term.  I was dazzled at the justices' trenchant
and witty interventions, but I came to see it as mostly entertainment.
With 25% of opinions ending in 5-4 splits, intelligence does not itself
discover the best, most rational or "correct" outcome.

This term I am teaching at a US law school and I am reading, for the first
time, many Supreme Court opinions from the ages.  I can't discern what
brilliance has wrought in many of those opinions - the reasoning and
conclusions seem more politically driven.

If the bench becomes a roost reserved for Mensa champions, what place is
there for judgment and objectivity?  I regret that I don't know judicial
history, but I suspect the best chancellors and judges from medieval
England were well-rounded and representative of their charges.

Peter Bowal