inkbluesky

snowy beach in winter

Time, time, time
See what’s become of me

Time, time, time
See what’s become of me
While I looked around
For my possibilities
I was so hard to please

Look around
Leaves are brown
And the sky
Is a hazy shade of winter

The lyrics are from Hazy Shade Of Winter, I know that Simon and Garfunkel and the Bangles covered it, but I’m not sure who wrote it.

What Chief Justice Roberts Forgot in His First Term: Judicial Modesty

That is not, however, how Chief Justice Roberts voted in his first term. He was modest in some cases, certainly, but generally ones in which criminal defendants, Democrats and other parties conservatives dislike were asking for something. When real estate developers, wealthy campaign contributors and other powerful parties wanted help, he was more inclined to support judicial action, even if it meant trampling on Congress and the states.

The term’s major environmental ruling was a striking case in point. A developer sued when the Army Corps of Engineers denied him a permit to build on what it determined to be protected wetlands. The corps is under the Defense Department, ultimately part of an elected branch, and it was interpreting the Clean Water Act, passed by the other elected branch. Courts are supposed to give an enormous amount of deference to agencies’ interpretations of the statutes they are charged with enforcing.

But Chief Justice Roberts did not defer. He joined a stridently anti-environmentalist opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia that sided with the developer and mocked the corps’s interpretation of the law — an interpretation four justices agreed with — as “beyond parody.” The opinion also complained that the corps’s approach was too costly. Justice John Paul Stevens dryly noted that whether benefits outweighed costs was a policy question that “should not be answered by appointed judges.”

I’m not a legal scholar, but as an average American with some education in history I find Robert’s judicial activism a little disconcerting. It is my understanding that Robert’s belongs to the textual school of the constitution and that being the case, if it wasn’t explicitly spelled out in the Constitution then that right does not exist. A rather quaint idea that a document written before the discovery of the atom, the refrigerator, or television should be interpreted solely in terms of an era of wooden dentures, three square hats and medical leeching. Even that being the case we can’t call Roberts or like the like minded real contextualists since it wasn’t until the Marshall Court of the 1800s that corporations started to gain non-explicit rights under what many still think was a strange interpretation of (Article 1, Section 10). It is no coincidence that with every ruling that sides with corporations such as Roberts against the Army Corp that corporate rights and personhood have increased while individuals rights have been diminished. Roberts is a young man in Supreme Court years, one wonders how many rights individual Americans will have shrunk over the course of his tenure.

War Photographer Catherine Leroy Dies

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Catherine Leroy, the French-born photojournalist whose stark images of battle helped tell the story of the Vietnam War in the pages of Life magazine and other publications, has died. She was 60.

Leroy died of cancer early Saturday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, said the attending physician, Dr. Jerome Helman.

French-born photojournalist Catherine Leroy, 22, is seen in this 1967 file photo in Vietnam before a combat jump for Operation Junction City. Leroy, the French-born photojournalist whose stark images of battle helped tell the story of the Vietnam War in the pages of Life magazine and other publications, died early Saturday, July, 8, 2006. She was 60.

Leroy was 21 years old in 1966 when she took a one-way ticket to Saigon to document American troops in Vietnam. A year later she became the only accredited journalist to participate in a combat parachute jump, joining the 173rd Airborne in Operation Junction City.