OA157: Are Originalist Judges Qualified? (w/guest David Michael)

Opening Arguments

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Law, Opinion, Politics, News, Liberal, Legal, Supremecourt, Harvard, Atheist

4.3 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2018

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Way back in Episode 49, Andrew argued that lawyers who claim to follow in the footsteps of Antonin Scalia-style originalism should be disqualified from serving on the U.S. Supreme Court, and that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee need to be challenging Scalia's acolytes (like Neil Gorsuch) on their underlying philosophy and not just their compassion (or lack thereof). In this episode, friend of the show David Michael challenges some of the points made by Andrew in the original episode , as well as raises new ones. Along with Thomas, we have a great three-way discussion about U.S. history, the Federalist papers, key cases, the underlying work of Robert Bork, and more. Does Andrew change his mind? Does Thomas? Listen and find out! After the lengthy interview, we end with the answer to an all-new TTTBE #67 about a gang party where the boss just wanted to "send a message." Remember that you can play along with #TTTBE by retweeting our episode on Twitter or sharing it on Facebook along with your guess. We'll release the answer on next Tuesday's episode along with our favorite entry! Recent Appearances None! Have us on your show! Show Notes & Links

You can listen to our (ahem) original episode on originalism, Episode 49.
Please also check out David Michael's new podcast, The Quorum!
Here’s a link to the full text of the Federalist Papers.
United States v. Carolene Products, 304 U.S. 144 (1938).
Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957 (1991) is the infamous decision in which Scalia declared that the Eighth Amendment only bars punishments that are both “cruel” and “unusual in the Constitutional sense.”

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Transcript

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1:02.8	Welcome to Opening Arguments, the podcast that pairs an inquisitive interviewer with the real-life lawyer.
1:07.8	This podcast is sponsored by the law offices of P. Andrew Torres, LLC for entertainment purposes, is not intended as legal advice and does not form an attorney-client relationship.
1:16.8	Don't take legal advice from a podcast.
1:26.8	Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments, this is episode 157. I'm your host Thomas Smith, that over there is your other host Andrew Torres Esquire. How you doing?
1:35.8	I am great, how are you?
1:37.8	Doing all right, I'm excited to be going to be an interesting show today. We've got David Michael on, I know we already was around for the TTTBE the other week.
1:48.8	But he got pushed a little bit due to extensive Stormy Daniels developments.
1:53.8	But we're going to, we've got that interview with David Michael, we're going to be talking all about originalism today, interesting stuff.
2:01.8	Anything we need to note before we go into this?
2:04.8	Yeah, what I would say is this episode is a follow up to an episode we did a year ago, it's opening arguments number 49, and it was titled Why Originalists Don't Belong on the Supreme Court.
2:18.8	It was my effort to oppose the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, which you can see how successful I was in doing so.
2:28.8	But I believe very, very strongly that the concept jurisprudence has been hijacked by political ideologues on the extreme right.
2:38.8	And I think they're calling it originalism and I think it is high time that lawyers that are anywhere to the left of that, including sort of mainstream conservatives, come out and say that this is not, you know, Scalia Gorsuch style originalism is not appropriate.
2:55.8	It's disqualifying to be on the Supreme Court. And David Michael takes up the mantle of asking whether I've made my case on that.
	...

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