@GorsuchBook Gorsuch on the due process that someone must knowingly violate a law in order to be convicted of... knowingly violating it amzn.to/2Lqur1t 
@GorsuchBook "This court’s failure to hold the government to its congressionally specified burden of proof means Mr. Games-Perez might very well be wrongfully imprisoned."
@GorsuchBook MY WHOLE HEART "hidden intentions never trump expressed ones." @GorsuchBook @davidjfeder
@GorsuchBook @davidjfeder "Congress could have written the law differently than it did, and it is always free to rewrite ... But in our legal order it is the role of the courts to apply the law as it is written, not some different law Congress might have written in the past or might write in the future."
@GorsuchBook @davidjfeder I just finished the book. Many tweets coming.
@GorsuchBook @davidjfeder "We often hear these days that a judge who rules for a criminal defendant is “soft” on crime, that a judge who rules against an employee “likes” corporations, and so many other things along those lines."
"People can easily forget that the law is meant to protect the beloved and the detested alike, and a judge who enforces the law equally for disfavored and favored persons alike will not usually win a popularity contest." amzn.to/2Lqur1t
"he issued one decision after another that protected the civil rights of African-Americans in a time and place that required high measures of both fortitude and integrity. As a result ... his community branded him a pariah. He was shunned on the street and snubbed in church."
"What do I mean by courage? Well, let’s start with what I don’t mean. I don’t mean blind bullheadedness or rudeness or incivility. We have all too much of those things in our culture and in our profession. They are pretenders of courage, not the real thing."
"We see those who confuse a judge’s ruling or a lawyer’s representation with support for the person’s cause or personal favoritism or bias... Attacks like these miss the mark. They misunderstand completely the roles of the judge and lawyer."
"consensus isn’t always possible, or even necessarily desirable. After all, who would have wanted Justice Harlan to forgo his dissent in Plessy calling on the Court to recognize the true meaning of the constitutional promise of equal protection of the laws due all persons?"
"Ours is often a counter-majoritarian function, aimed at protecting the constitutional rights of every person, even (and perhaps especially) in the face of strong opposition."
HE HAS MY WHOLE HEART
HE HAS MY WHOLE HEART
"Our intentional choices reflect and shape our character—who we are and who we wish to be—in a way that unintended or accidental consequences cannot."
The book also has a FANTASTIC and honest chapter on how to determine the use of precedent. Excerpts do not do it justice.
"When should judges follow—or overrule—a prior decision they earnestly believe to be mistaken? Most everyone would agree the answer isn’t always or never; judgment is required."
"In the words of Jerome Frank, courts may “feel obligated to consecrate their former blunders.”
"In the words of Jerome Frank, courts may “feel obligated to consecrate their former blunders.”
"If a seventh grader starts trading fake burps for laughs in gym class, what’s a teacher to do?"
"As my friend Judge John Kane likes to say, the greatest proof of any society’s commitment to the rule of law may be whether the govt can and does lose in its own courts and then respects those judgments. That doesn’t happen everywhere, but it happens in the US day in and day out
The book also gets deep onto the lack of access to justice and how it happens
“[t]here is no one in the US over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.” ..." it’s little surprise, too, that criminal defendants routinely feel no choice but to plead guilty."
“[t]here is no one in the US over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime.” ..." it’s little surprise, too, that criminal defendants routinely feel no choice but to plead guilty."
"we’ve witnessed the death of the criminal trial: Today, only about 1.5 percent of civil cases are decided by jury trial, and more than 97% of federal convictions come through plea bargains. These facts, I think, should worry anyone who fears the arbitrary exercise of power."
"As Adams put it, the right to vote and the right to trial by jury represented democracy’s “heart and lungs, the mainspring and the centre wheel,…without [which] the body must die, the watch must run down, the government must become arbitrary.”"
"should we be concerned when 80 % of the American College of Trial Lawyers say that discovery costs and delays keep injured parties from bringing valid claims to court? Or when 70 % also say attorneys use discovery costs as a threat to force settlements that aren’t based ..."
Gorsuch very obviously reads @TheMikeChase
"Biden worried that we have assumed a tendency to “federalize everything that walks, talks, and moves.” Maybe we should say hoots, too, because it’s now a federal crime to misuse the likeness of Woodsy Owl or his immortal words..."
"Biden worried that we have assumed a tendency to “federalize everything that walks, talks, and moves.” Maybe we should say hoots, too, because it’s now a federal crime to misuse the likeness of Woodsy Owl or his immortal words..."
"Without written laws, we lack fair notice of the rules we must obey. But with too many written laws, don’t we invite a new kind of fair notice problem?"
On ideas for reform of the legal profession itself
More
"Yet Rule 5.4 of the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct—adopted by most states—prohibits nonlawyers from obtaining “any interest” in a law firm. So while consumers may obtain basic medical and accounting services cheaply and conveniently in and thanks to (say) ...
"Yet Rule 5.4 of the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct—adopted by most states—prohibits nonlawyers from obtaining “any interest” in a law firm. So while consumers may obtain basic medical and accounting services cheaply and conveniently in and thanks to (say) ...
... Walmart, they can’t secure similar assistance with a will or a landlord-tenant problem"
The value of early and firm trial dates
More ideas for legal reforms
On legal education reform
We’ve come a long way from Abraham Lincoln’s insistence that “[i]f you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself.
We’ve come a long way from Abraham Lincoln’s insistence that “[i]f you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself.
"Where did the idea of three years of graduate education come from? It appears most states adopted the requirement at the behest of the ABA."
ABA also invoked that AMA "had proposed a 4-year standard for physicians and reasoned that, because law, like medicine, is a complex field, legal studies should last for a comparable period—an argument that seems to have stemmed more from professional pride than empirical proof"
"one starting place might be to permit students to sit for the bar after only two years of study, allowing students and employers alike to determine the value of an optional third year of law school. President Obama, himself a Harvard-trained lawyer, has promoted this concept."
"This diversity of legal education options does not appear to be a threat to the rule of law in the United Kingdom—and it is difficult to see how it might be here."
"The Sixth and Seventh Amendments guarantee the right to a jury trial, yet we have almost no trials anymore. Today, not even 2 percent of civil cases see a jury. Plenty of factors have contributed to this development. But one may lie in our own self-imposed rules."
He just like ripped this guy to absolute shreds
"She taught me that headlines are fleeting—courage lasts."
That's all. This is genuinely one of the best books I've ever read. amzn.to/2Lqur1t no space to tweet so much more, but I highly recommend the book. It's a bit haphazard at times, likely because its goal was less form than function. But I learned so much reading this.
I plan to reread at some point. But he even gets into explaining the logic of some of his controversial decisions. Really cannot recommend enough, esp for anyone interested in law, Carpenter, policy, legal ethics, and life legal-adjacent fields
