In efforts to expose (or explore) the history of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, few things have emerged as certainties. He's conservative, but not too conservative, or perhaps really conservative. He has argued against abortion, but that may not be his personal view, or maybe it really is. What is the one certainty about John Roberts that has emerged from all this digging? He's a complete nerd.
John G. Roberts Jr. could have easily ignored the letter from E. F. W. Wildermuth that came across his desk in December 1982. The correspondent, an octogenarian lawyer from New York, made an obscure procedural point about the Senate's jurisdiction based on his interpretation of the 17th Amendment; it was not the sort of question that would typically require serious attention from the White House counsel's office, where Mr. Roberts worked at the time.
But rather than dismiss the letter as the work of a curmudgeon, Mr. Roberts seized on it with delight.
Acknowledging that the White House usually ignored such mail, he wrote to his superior, Fred F. Fielding, the White House counsel, "Anyone who can quote inspiring passages from Plato and Webster, however, and use a word like 'slumgullion,' deserves a reply, and I have drafted one for your signature."
"Slumgullion" being, for the record, a thin stew.
It was a typical remark from a legal scholar who is said to have never lost a local spelling bee as a child and who once wrote an entire White House memorandum in French. In fact, an obsession with rhetorical precision is a central Roberts trait, said friends and former colleagues of the man nominated by President Bush to become a Supreme Court justice.
Roberts has corrected grammar and vocabulary in memos that were argued with flawless legal reasoning. He has corrected colleagues, subordinates, and superiors if they mistakenly write "effect" rather than "affect" or "plurilateral" rather than "multilateral." And did you catch that he wrote a White House memo entirely in French? Apparently, though, he accents (or offsets) his intense grammar policing with a decent sense of humor.
David Garrow, a professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta, said: "It has been a consistently striking feature again and again - in even the very sort of informal memos that it's hard to imagine he ever thought someone would be reading 20 years later - that there is this very demanding precision, but it's not just grammatical. He is also extremely precise and demanding in his word usage."
Mr. Garrow added, "To my mind, the interesting combination here is that we have this very exacting insistence upon precision coupled with what, for a lawyer, is a remarkable sense of humor."
So when Judge Roberts is confirmed (and there's little question that he will be), perhaps his concurrences with Justice Scalia will at least be peppered with some language corrections. While Roberts's decisions may not thrill liberals, we can all share in a little gleeful Scalia baiting now and then.
Pretty much this has become another Democrats vs Republicans screaming match that leaves reasonable assessments of Roberts' skills by the side of the road in favor of indescernable rhetoric comming out of every paid for pundit's mouth.
hadees said:
Pretty much this has become another Democrats vs Republicans screaming match that leaves reasonable assessments of Roberts' skills by the side of the road in favor of indescernable rhetoric comming out of every paid for pundit's mouth.
hadees said:
Pretty much this has become another Democrats vs Republicans screaming match that leaves reasonable assessments of Roberts' skills by the side of the road in favor of indescernable rhetoric comming out of every paid for pundit's mouth.
hadees said:
Pretty much this has become another Democrats vs Republicans screaming match that leaves reasonable assessments of Roberts' skills by the side of the road in favor of indescernable rhetoric comming out of every paid for pundit's mouth.
[Edited on Aug 29, 2005 by hadees]
You didn't read the story, did you?
yes i did, and I am not sure what your point is
Errrr, the story had nothing to do with "democrats vs. republicans" and actually did contain a "reasonable assessment" of Roberts' skills... In grammar and spelling.
My point was that your post had nothing to do with the story.
hadees said:
Pretty much this has become another Democrats vs Republicans screaming match that leaves reasonable assessments of Roberts' skills by the side of the road in favor of indescernable rhetoric comming out of every paid for pundit's mouth.
misstyrios
NEWSWIRE
Allston, MA
AUG 29, 2005 01:06 PM