"There are times when the old bunk about an independent and fearless judiciary means a good deal." -- Judge Learned Hand, 1917
The more I read about that judge, the more I like her. This is from a former dean of the U. of Chicago Law School ...
"Who is Judge Taylor, anyway? Knowing little about her, I decided to check her out. She is an African-American graduate of Yale Law School (JD '57). In 1964, she spent the summer ("Freedom Summer") in Mississippi to help provide legal services for civil rights activists. She arrived in Mississippi on the very day that three young civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi. When she and several other attorneys went to the sheriff's office to inquire about the disappearance, they were surrounded by a mob of hostile whites who hurled racial epithets at Taylor and her companions. Forty-four days later, the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were found at Olen Barrage's Old Jolly Farm, six miles northeast of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Each of the civil rights workers had been shot in the heart. Four decades after the murders, in June 2005, Edgar Ray Killien, a local minister and member of the Klan, was finally brought to justice ...
"Judges are who they are. They strive to follow the law, but personal experience and character matter. I have little doubt that Judge Taylor's willingness to face the merits in ACLU v. NSA was in part the consequence of who she is as a person. Her decision took personal courage and a genuine commitment to the rule of law. The same kind of courage and commitment she manifested forty years ago during Freedom Summer. We need judges cut from such cloth." |
