The President wants an empathetic jurist to replace David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He will likely get such a one.

What the country will get in that event is one more senator or cabinet member -- as straw boss, head knocker, high and mighty arbiter of high and mighty matters. A sort of modern Roman consul, exhibited to us as on a balcony, awaiting our cheers or boos but enjoying inner serenity all the same; the serenity that comes of knowing -- yaaah, yaaah, yaaaah -- can't touch me, I'm the judge. Though I do feel your pain.

As Barack Obama, who will send the new lawgiver's name to a Democratic Senate for automatic ratification, gave us to know last week, "[J]ustice isn't about some abstract legal theory. It's also about how laws affect the daily activities of people's lives -- whether they can make a living, care for their families, whether they feel safer in their homes and welcome in their own nation." An empathetic justice, by Obama's reckoning, takes all those considerations into account -- then, with a sweep of the hand, hands down The Law.

That's leaving aside a couple of things our constitutional law professor-turned-national CEO doesn't acknowledge:

One man's "empathetic" judge is another man's idea of Caesar in a long black robe.

Some "abstract legal theories" make perfect sense, such as that the people's will gets a better shake normally from the people's elected representatives than from some board of human divinities accountable to no one for their motives and actions.

The national argument that commences as soon Obama names somebody to the high court is painfully familiar. We have it every time a new justice is named -- Bork, Souter, Thomas, Ginsberg, and so on.

The division that one of these judicial tiffs occasions among us proceeds from the arrogance peculiar to the unelected judge who sees his essential mission as prophetic in character -- designed to rattle society and shake up things the judge sees as needing shake-up. Continued...