Activist Judge

Re "The Flight From Pensions," editorial, May 12: The last two decades have seen the airline carriers plagued with bankruptcies and collapse. Yet the companies continue with give-away "mileage" programs? How can that be? American business used to be more of a smart, efficient, productive, market-driven, covenant-keeping place that nourished our country. It seems now that most corporate businesses have some cheap, clever, compromise scheme or trick from bandit/pirate CEOs, caused by or partnered with government and/or a corrupt legal system that almost always comes back to bite us. United's broken pension promise is just the latest.

Missouri officials must let a pregnant inmate have an abortion, the Supreme Court said Monday, rejecting an appeal by Republican Gov. Matt Blunt. The state argued that taxpayers should not have to pick up the tab for transporting the woman to an abortion clinic. Blunt criticized the court, saying its decision "is highly offensive to traditional Missouri values and is contrary to state law, which prohibits taxpayer dollars from being spent to facilitate abortions."

A federal judge, saying "intelligent design" is "an interesting theological argument, but ... not science," ruled Tuesday that a school board violated the Constitution by compelling biology teachers to present the concept as an alternative to evolution. The ruling came after U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III heard 21 days of testimony in a closely watched trial that pitted a group of parents against the school board in the town of Dover, Pa.

Comes now John Ashcroft (R-Mo.), revealing that he is the senator who earlier this month put a hold on the nomination of Margaret Morrow to the federal district court in Los Angeles, stalling indefinitely the elevation of this worthy attorney to the bench. Morrow, former president of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. and the State Bar, was nominated to the bench in 1996.

In deciding the case of Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, the Supreme Court, led by its newly installed chief justice, Earl Warren, concluded that "in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place." Few words uttered by members of the United States Supreme Court have more profoundly shaped American society.

The Supreme Court intervened in the disputed Cleveland voucher case Friday and cleared the way for more students to receive state tuition subsidies to enroll in religious schools. The high court, acting on a 5-4 vote, overturned a federal judge's order that blocked new students from taking advantage of the voucher program while the Cleveland case moves through the courts. The emergency order sends another strong signal that the court's conservative majority believes vouchers are constitutional.

When Leah Ward Sears was sworn in Tuesday as chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, at her side was an old friend and fellow Georgian: Clarence Thomas. They share a hometown, the coastal city of Savannah, and the experience of rising to the top of the judicial system as an African American. Another experience she and the U.S. Supreme Court justice share, Sears said, is political attack.

Court of Appeal Justice Janice Rogers Brown, who is up for confirmation to the California Supreme Court this week, expressed strong conservative views in legal writings that state bar evaluators reviewed before finding her unqualified for the state high court. In a 1993 Sacramento bar journal article, Brown complained that government was too big and expressed dismay about lawyers who advocate civil liberties for topless dancers and the homeless but not for public prayer.

In a setback to anti-gay rights movements across the nation, a Denver judge on Friday blocked a new state law banning protected status for homosexuals pending a trial on its constitutionality later this year. Denver District Court Judge Jeffrey Bayless found that Colorado homosexuals are in danger of immediate and irreparable harm and that the opponents of the measure have a reasonable probability of winning their lawsuit on constitutional grounds.

Mickey Edwards makes several valid points in his May 9 Opinion piece about conservatives' abandonment of what had been core principles when the fruits of those principles offend their sensibilities, imperil their financial interests or might cost their candidates votes. Those same conservatives' criticism of the so-called "activist judiciary" is self-serving. Judges do not choose the cases brought before them, and only the higher courts have the limited power to deny an appeal based on errors in law during trial.