Thomas, turning 73 this summer, would become the oldest justice. Come fall he’ll hit his 30-year SCOTUS anniversary. If we’re to take early reports from his tenure seriously and he stays healthy, he’ll stick around for another 13 years.
(I, of course, remain shocked he didn’t learn the lessons of Scalia and Ginsburg and let McConnell ram through his replacement immediately after Barrett’s confirmation)
Alito just turned 71. He’s been on the bench for 15 years now. I just don’t see Alito pulling a Souter and calling it quits south of a quarter century. If he remains healthy and the politics are favorable, mayyyyyybe he’ll go in 2031, leaving the 1994-2005 streak intact by a year
Meanwhile @steve_vladeck is too polite to crash my replies so he slid into my DMs with this fact-check: The 1994-2005 streak was actually 15 days shy of the record set between when Story arrived and Livingston died
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Now that this thing is actually live I’ll say it again: doesn’t matter what your ideological priors are - if you don’t have Taney beating McReynolds/Field in the finals, you’re doing it all wrong
Me? I’ll have Taney over McReynolds because Field was at least on the right side of Slaughterhouse even though he was doing it for the wrong reasons, while McReynolds, however odious his person and wrong his views, didn’t, you know, write Dred Scott.
Thomas’s suggestion appears to have had its genesis in Richard Epstein’s comments in this FedSoc webinar from February fedsoc.org/events/is-comm…
This continues the left-right convergence on limiting Big Tech’s power. But this introduces a new difference among the many distinctions already dividing the two sides’ approaches...
Owning the libs by...legislatively overturning Flood v. Kuhn, which libs would...celebrate for strengthening labor rights and vindicating Curt Flood, who was the Kaepernick of his time. Well done.
Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall - the Court’s three most liberal members - dissented from Flood v. Kuhn. Repping flood was Arthur Goldberg, who had been one of the Warren Court’s big liberals.
Every once in a SCOTUS justice picks one of their side's ideological issues over another, sometimes--but not always--to the benefit of the opposite side's preferred result.
Here's what the six conservative justices put at the top of their lists:
Roberts, with rare exception, puts his standing hawkishness over his substantive agenda. Proof: his first-ever solo dissent today was against an Evangelical Christian college student arguing a free speech violation; his vote in the Prop 8 case to the benefit of SSM in CA.
(Top of my head, Roberts rare exception assuming standing when he otherwise may not have: the Fisher affirmative action cases)
The district court judge at the center of this story is 54. That alone means she’s not going to be a SCOTUS nominee, no matter what else she has going for her.
Influential members of Congress can pitch their preferred names all day long but sitting right by POTUS is a VPOTUS from a state where its highest court houses a 44yo black female justice who cut her teeth in the US Solicitor General’s office after clerking for Justice Stevens
And while Breyer could pull a Kennedy and put his thumb on the scales for his own former clerk, I think KBJ is more likely to get elevated to Garland or Tatel’s seat on the DC Cir than skip straight to SCOTUS