Becoming Justice Blackmun by Linda Greenhouse

In the lower court decision that was the subject of the appeal, Judge Richard A. That is a question to which the classic and easy answer The issue was whether the government has a constitutional duty to protect a person from private harm, from a danger not of the government’s own creation. Winnebago County Social Services Department. The subject of the memo was whether the court should agree to hear a case called DeShaney v. The consequences of the path it chose are with us still. In search of a lead.” But there was one little memo - only three pages - from Septemberġ987 that struck me as worthy of note, not so much for what it says about either the law clerk or the Supreme Court nominee, but for how it recalls a moment when the court faced a particularly interesting fork in I can’t claim to have looked at more than a small fraction of this output and, when I think of my former colleagues back in the newsroom, my main reaction has been, “There but for the grace of God go I Pages of Kagan-related documents pouring forth in the run-up to the Senate confirmation hearing that begins a week from Monday. Two Republican senators find the memos that Elena Kagan wrote as a Supreme Court law clerk to be mysteriously “troubling.” Truth be told, reporters on the Kagan beat have found the memos troubling as well, due to an almost complete absence of news value that has left journalists scrambling to construct articles from the thousands of Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court and the law.

Becoming Justice Blackmun by Linda Greenhouse