Over the weekend, Washington Post Magazine interviewed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, while New York interviewed Justice Antonin Scalia. The two are great friends, depending on each other for edits and criticisms of each other’s opinions. Both their interviews are worth a read.
The new Supreme Court term is beginning this month. There is some pressure on Ginsberg to leave the bench before 2016 to allow President Obama to appoint a younger liberal justice.
As you read, I leave you with the following quote from Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 78 on the importance of lifetime appointments:
Hence it is that there can be but few men in the society who will have sufficient skill in the laws to qualify them for the stations of judges. And making the proper deductions for the ordinary depravity of human nature, the number must be still smaller of those who united the requisite integrity with the requisite knowledge.
…and that a temporary duration in office which would naturally discourage such characters from quitting a lucrative line of practice to accept a seat on the bench would have a tendency to throw the administration of justice into hands less able and less well qualified to conduct it with utility and dignity. [Emphasis mine]
