Live Q&As

That's the "real question"?  Really?  And what, would you suggest as the "reasonable age" for mandatory retirement?

Rather than an artificial age-based argument, why not go with an evidence-based one instead?  Do you see any indication of a Justice who remained on the court passed the time at which they had the intellectual vitality to serve?  THAT, and only that, should be the limiting issue in a Jutice's tenure.  And that, along with their lifetime appointment to the court, is what helps to lift the court's decision making processes above the fray of day to day politics.

You make a bold claim, but fail to back it up.  Your summary of CJ Roberts however, is spot on.  Unfortunately, his self-described role as "an umpire", not a player in the making of law and policy, does not assure objectivity.  It does however help to hold in check the personal biases that are part of all people's intellectual processes.

Scalia was simply being Scalia, and it's not at all clear that his harsh ranting and comments regarding the future were actually the basis for his ruling re immigration.  What he demonstrated though, was that from both the left and the right, no matter how strenuously the latter may claim otherwise, personal perspective is always present when one interprets the law -- or anything else for that matter.  The trick lies in being as self-aware as posible and continuously asking one's self, if one happens to be a member of SCOTUS, are they playing the game or serving as the umpire.  Whatever one thinks about ACA/Obamacare, CJ Roberts did a magnificent job of that in his ruling, and deserves great praise for having done so.

Of course not, especially as neither you nor anyone else knows how his son feels about the issue.  Would you want  him to recuse himself if you knew that his son supported the President and found the new policy to be appropriate not just for the country, but for the Catholic Church?  I am guessing not.

Discussions of who should recuse themselves, like most assessments of what the Court is or should be doing, are typically more about how to get the Court to do what the speakers would like policy to be, not what the law actually requires or allows.  In truth, most people should recuse themselves from discussing the law until they can distinguish between it and discussions of policy advocacy.

That was his wife, not him.  I am curious, how would you feel about a Justice who argued for a law when she was Solicitor General, and then heard a case on same when she was later sitting on the Court?  That is what Justice Kagan did, but my guess, since you only asked about one of them, is that you are perfectly fine with the latter, and are fine with it because you happen to agree with here conclusion regarding the policy in question. 

You are correct that impartiality is a fiction, if by impartiality you mean that judges should be able to disassociate all past personal, intellectual and psychological experience -- acting as legal machines.  But if by impartiality one means the ability to strive for decisions which are reached by appeal to the law itself, and not specific outcomes which the decisor longs to see, then not only is imparitality not a fiction, SCOTUS typicially does a very good job.

You appreciate the impossiblity of the kind objectivity which too many people long for, both for court members and for the rest of us.  You also accept that good decision making is about managing uncertainty and structuring ambiguity, not getting rid of them.  That is a wise view and more than worthy of sharing with our readers.  Thanks!

I think that you are largely correct.  In fact, the maleability and interpretability of the Constitution are central facets of durable value as our nation's guiding document.  No cut and dry text -- one which could only and always mean only one thing -- could survive and remain meaningful for centuries, at least not within a healthy and vibrant society.

I have seen "reports" that the sky is falling, that the Mafia arranged the asassination of JFK, and that the United States govenment was behind the attacks of 9/11, but that doesn't make any of them true.  So before you cast judgement on the CJ based on reports which are backed up with no evidence, take a breath and ask yourself if you, in light of your definiton of the Court's task, should not be especially happy today.

Look at what happened!  A self-declared legal conservative sided with the liberals because as a matter of law, not policy, he thought it was the correct thing to do.  Whether you agree with Roberts or not, he made exactly the kind of tough call, especially from his perspective, that you want to see.

There is plenty of fodder her to use against the President, if that is your want, but Roberts did his job, and he actually did it in the rather conservative legal style for which he is known.  The real story here is that tons of plotical conservatives are stunned to discover that being a politcal conservative and a legal conservative are not one and the same.  On top of that, those same people discovered that solid legal conservatism is not simply a tool for achieving a set of "large C", conservative poliitcal policies, whether they are good for the country or not.

You are over-reducing bot hthe  contextual or social reality approach to reading and the author or original intent approach.  There is actually room for them to coexist in a coherent and sophisitcated way, especially when  it comes to reading the law because the intent approach still demands application to new contexts.

Ironically, to the extent that any of that tension was related to the healthcare decision, it left us with a legal conservative confounding politcal conservatives because of his application of the law, not his deisre to manufacture a policy.

Not only an attorney, but a wise one, and one who speaks to issues with far bigger implications!  Your assessment of the court and how people respond is spot on.  People's confusion between good legal process and obtaining the policy they want is exhausting, and until we get them to appreciate the difference we will keep have the same silly fights.

Most important though is your observation that "some people don't believe that anyone could honestly and with integrity disagree with their chosen judicial philosophy."  How true, and in pretty much all areas of life!

As long as people keep insisting that wisdom, honesty and integrity are limited to those policies with which they happen to agree, we are all in trouble.  That approach paralyzes government, starts wars, and genrally degrades the human condition.  The real opportunity of this moment, however one feels about the healthcare law, is to learn from a court which can, at it's best, see a bigger picture.

You are simply wrong about what the headline assumes, but given that the whole conversation is about the multiple ways in which a text can be read, I have to respect the possibility.  Certainly that is what it communicated to you, so I will ammend my original claim: you are wrong about what I believe and what most readers have understood.  I DO appreciate that in doing so, you gave us all a very pragmatic opportunity to see how multiple interpretations can arise from a single text, however brief. 

I am happy to address what you think would be a better question -- by which you mean the question you most want to ask.  I respect the desire, but try not to conflate "best" with whatever you most desire -- it's a misguided approach to pretty much everything.

The answer is that individual politcal aggendas can be surpressed, certainly at the level of conscious supression.  It get trickier when one is dealing with less concious desires, but that is true for all of us always, so unless we desire anlaysis which leads to paralysis, we msut press on as best we can, being as self-aware as we can, and leaving as much room for subsequent correction as possible.  That's true for SCOTUS and its Justices, and true for all of us as we go through our own lives.

You are certainly correct about the overlap which can and does occur between legal and politcal philosophies.  It really isn't surprising if one expects politcs to be a means through which we legally achieve our vision of a good society -- however that may be understood.  That is why I am much more interested in self-awareness and transparency than is in some presumtion of mechanistic impartialty.  The former demands caution and care while the latter is simply invoked and passed over.