Bench Memos

Get ‘Em While They’re Young

The New York Times Magazine interviews retired justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who wants to talk about OurCourts.org, her pet project for indoctrinating the youth of America in the putative virtues of judicial supremacy:

Q: What would you like us to know about the judicial branch of our government?

A: Apparently a great many people have forgotten that the framers of our Constitution went to such great effort to create an independent judicial branch that would not be subject to retaliation by either the executive branch or the legislative branch because of some decision made by those judges.

As I said two years ago in my tour of what certain important framers (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay) actually thought, Justice O’Connor has a decidely partial understanding of our founding history.  Not surprisingly, she has a view of our constitutional principles that conduces to the power of the institution in which she spent most of her career.  The nation’s children deserve a better teacher.

Matthew J. Franck is retired from Princeton University, where he was a lecturer in Politics and associate director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is also a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, a contributing editor of Public Discourse, and professor emeritus of political science at Radford University.
Exit mobile version