Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu has been nomimated to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
... Liu is only 39 years old and has very limited experience practicing law, he is viewed by many liberals as a strong candidate for a SCOTUS nomination down the road.
Apparently he's a racial reparations supporter:
verumserum.com
And more:
In his law-review article “Rethinking Constitutional Welfare Rights,” 61 Stan. L. Rev. 203 (2008), Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu, drawing on the work of moral philosopher Michael Walzer, makes the case for what he calls an interstitial judicial role in recognizing constitutional welfare rights—i.e., “claimed affirmative rights,” as Liu quotes Frank Michelman, to “education, shelter, subsistence, health care and the like, or to the money these things cost.”
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Here’s the core of Liu’s own summary of his argument (pp. 203-204):
My thesis is that the legitimacy of judicial recognition of welfare rights depends on socially situated modes of reasoning that appeal not to transcendent moral principles for an ideal society, but to the culturally and historically contingent meanings of particular social goods in our own society.… I argue that judicial recognition of welfare rights is best conceived as an act of interpreting the shared understandings of particular welfare goods as they are manifested in our institutions, laws, and evolving social practices.
On this account, the existence of a welfare right depends on democratic instantiation in the first instance, typically in the form of a legislated program, with the judiciary generally limited to an interstitial role. Further, because the shared understandings of a given society are ultimately subject to democratic revision, courts cannot fix the existence or contours of a welfare right for all time. So conceived, justiciable [i.e., judicially cognizable] welfare rights reflect the contingent character of our society's collective judgments rather than the tidy logic of a comprehensive moral theory.
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bench.nationalreview.com
I think "shared understanding" means 'what liberals think'.
Same sex marriage is a constitutional right:
bench.nationalreview.com
Goodwin Liu on the Death Penalty [Ed Whelan]
On his Crime and Consequences blog, Kent Scheidegger, a California-based expert on criminal law generally and on the death penalty in particular, calls for “pull-out-the-stops opposition” to Goodwin Liu’s nomination to the Ninth Circuit:
To anyone familiar with the death penalty debate, it is painfully evident that Professor Liu takes the murderers' side on every debatable point. If confirmed, there is no doubt in my mind that he will be a vote to obstruct the enforcement of capital punishment in virtually every case. Adding him to the Ninth [Circuit] would take a court that is already far out of the judicial mainstream and push it even further in that direction.
bench.nationalreview.com
Goodwin Liu: Too Left-Wing for Rahm Emanuel [Ed Whelan]
According to a trustworthy source, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel initially vetoed Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu’s candidacy for the Ninth Circuit on the ground that Liu’s left-wing record made him too controversial. But new White House counsel Robert Bauer, eager to please the Left, successfully pushed back.
bench.nationalreview.com
Re: Goodwin Liu on Racial Quotas Forever [Ed Whelan]
With generous praise for my exposition of Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu’s extreme support for racial quotas in perpetuity, John Rosenberg highlights on his Discriminations blog the contradiction between what he calls President Obama’s “promised land of post-racialism” and the hard-Left racialism of Liu (and of Obama’s civil-rights appointees). Rosenberg reposts his critique of a 2006 op-ed by Liu that argued against a “colorblind” reading of Brown v. Board of Education and that, in so doing, treated a failure to pursue racial balancing, or quotas, in schools as a form of “racial apartheid.” Rosenberg also reposts some fun that he had revising America’s foundational documents to reflect Liu’s racialism.
bench.nationalreview.com
More posts on Goodwin Liu:
bench.nationalreview.com
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