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• ruling against public prayer in the Indiana State Legislature over "the use of Christ's name or title".  Yet, a Muslim imam's prayer to "Allah" was seemingly okay to Judge Hamilton

• opposing the placement of a menorah in the Indianapolis-Marion County Building

• blocking the implementation of an informed consent law for 7 years

• disregarding the prior conviction of a repeat drug offender, effectively ignoring a law requiring the Judge to sentence the convicted offender to life in prison

Please join the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform for our 10th Annual Legal Reform Summit on Wednesday, October 28, 2009, featuring:

Legislative Keynote Morning Address
by U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions, Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee

and

“Leading in a Climate of Change”
Keynote Luncheon Address
by Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida

In addition, Tom Donohue, President and CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will provide special remarks. The Summit will also feature distinguished panelists exploring a variety of timely legal topics, including:

• Courting New Money: Third Party Financing of Litigation and its Consequences. Should Outside Investors Have a Stake? Academics will release new research and discuss and debate the growing trend of third parties financing lawsuits.
• Climate Change Litigation: The New Mass Tort for the 21st Century? Panelists will speak to the legal theories and trends in climate change litigation as well as regulatory and legislative developments and their impact on the business community.
• Judicial Selection: Best Practices in Nomination States. ILR will release a “best practices” guide to judicial selection in nomination states.
• It’s Economics Stupid: Exploring the Relationship Between Lawsuits and Rising Healthcare Costs. Jeb Bush will facilitate a panel discussion on the economic impact of lawsuits on the practice of medicine and rising healthcare costs.
• Trial Lawyer Crystal Ball: Predictions and Prognostications on the Road Ahead. We will host a discussion on the trial bar’s priorities.

In addition, we will honor the recipients of ILR’s 2009 Legal Reform Awards.

Registration will open at 7:45 a.m.  The program will follow from 8:15 a.m. and run throughout the day until 4:30 p.m. which will include a post event reception.

Register online today!  Receive half off a second registration when you register yourself for the Summit! (Expires October 16th)

On Oct. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a major religious liberty case. In Salazar v. Buono, an ACLU-backed Frank Buono is suing to have a war memorial torn down. This is a World War I memorial in the shape of a cross, which has been standing in the Mojave Desert since 1934, erected by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). But this memorial happens to be in a national park, so the militant atheists in this country have taken it upon themselves to destroy it by filing a federal lawsuit.

This case has now been through four rounds of litigation. Finally, when the ACLU and their client won before the Ninth Circuit, something amazing took place. The VFW offered to swap a parcel of land that the VFW owned—a parcel of equal value with the parcel in the national park on which the cross stands that the government owns. Congress, working with the Bush White House, actually passed a federal law ordering this land swap, which would result in the cross then being on private land at no loss to the taxpayer.
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Now that a third ACORN video has surfaced, a pattern emerges of ACORN workers willing to help people engage in prostitution, tax fraud, housing fraud, and even human trafficking. Under federal law, a RICO investigation is now warranted. Three strikes and you’re out, ACORN.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former high-ranking members of his administration won’t be criminally charged in a yearlong federal investigation into pay-to-play allegations involving one of the Democratic governor’s large political donors, someone familiar with the case said.

The decision not to pursue indictments was made by top Justice Department officials, according to a person familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be identified because federal officials had not disclosed results of the probe.

“It’s over. There’s nothing. It was killed in Washington,” the person told The Associated Press.

A federal grand jury began an investigation in 2008 into a possible pay-to-play scheme in which lucrative work on state bond deals went to a Richardson donor. The federal probe derailed Richardson’s appointment as commerce secretary in President Barack Obama’s administration.

Richardson withdrew his nomination in January, saying the investigation would have delayed his confirmation although he said expected to be cleared.

Haha, I'm sure he did.

The Arizona senator calls Sotomayor a judicial activist who tried to walk back from that record during her confirmation hearings. He says President Barack Obama's nominee has used her position as a judge to try to change the law...

McCain says Sotomayor's life story is inspiring and compelling, but he says that's not enough to qualify her for a position on the high court.

WHAT HAPPENED TO PRESIDENT OBAMA’S EMPATHY STANDARD?
“Republicans have effectively set a new standard that future nominees
will be pressed to meet”

BEFORE: “By making empathy a core qualification, he is uniting his own eclectic experience as a community organizer and constitutional-law professor while demanding what he has called ‘a broader vision for what America should be.’” (Obama Makes Empathy Requirement for Court, Washington Post, 5/13/09)

AFTER: “By forcing Judge Sotomayor to retreat from Mr. Obama’s desire for justices with ‘empathy,’ Republicans have effectively set a new standard that future nominees will be pressed to meet.” (Future Nominations are at Stake in Hearings, New York Times, 7/16/09)

BEFORE: “President Barack Obama said last week that he’d be looking for “empathy” in his Supreme Court nominee… Obama’s comments Friday about judges needing to identify ‘with people’s hopes and struggles’ and the reaction to those remarks seemed to cast the early debate in a way that is likely to favor Democrats.” (Obama’s Search for Empathy Shapes Supreme Court Replacement Debate, Politico, 5/4/09)

AFTER: “‘empathy,’ the quality President Barack Obama has proposed as a criterion for his judges, got a pummeling from both Republicans and Democrats -- and from the nominee herself.” (‘Empathy’ Takes a Knock in Confirmation Hearings, Wall Street Journal, 7/20/09)

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"I, [NAME], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as a Justice of the Supreme Court under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."

It's not just Judge Sotomayor's repeated assertions about a "wise Latina woman" making better decisions than a white man.  It's that she accepts -- and even embraces -- the notion of subjectivity in judging, as in this statement:

I simply do not know exactly what that difference [based on my personal experiences] will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.

Anyone who is not willing at least to strive for complete objectivity and impartiality in judging has no business on any court -- and certainly not on the Supreme Court.   Yet, in Sotomayor's view, sometimes biases and prejudices are perfectly acceptable, as this statement indicates:

I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

Had the once-all-white-male judiciary of pre-civil-rights-era America been so comfortable with the notion that sometimes "opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate," the struggle for equal rights would have been even more difficult.  And if the entire judiciary now embraced Judge Sotomayor's vision, litigation would devolve into a system where parties would simply  hope that they were of the "right" ethnicity and gender to engage the "sympathies and prejudices" of the judge charged with rendering a decision.

Her vision is a complete abrogation of the judicial role.  No senator can vote, in good conscience, to confirm a judge who is so careless about the concept of "equal justice under law" -- even if they think they like the outcomes that Judge Sotomayor's "opinions, sympathies and prejudices"  will precipitate.