“Personal Views” Or Character?

Not long ago I argued (here) that liberals are so interested in Judge Roberts’s “personal views” because, most of them having sacrificed their old beliefs in principles and even text on the altar of what is, at best, a refurbished legal realism and, at worst, the morass of post-modernism, they assume that judges are not constrained by anything, that they can and do impose their “personal views” at will.

Or at least conservative judges do. Liberal judges, presumably, either have more character, or perhaps are fortunate that their “personal views” always co-incide with what “the law” requires. As I wrote before,

Liberals, in short, seem to believe that liberal judges, unlike conservative judges, are perfectly capable of doing what conservatives say judges should do but liberals, otherwise, say is impossible.

Now comes liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, who says that he has no trouble deciding cases in ways that go against his personal views.

Addressing a bar association meeting in Las Vegas, Justice Stevens dissected several of the recent term’s decisions, including his own majority opinions in two of the term’s most prominent cases. The outcomes were “unwise,” he said, but “in each I was convinced that the law compelled a result that I would have opposed if I were a legislator.”

If you ask me, the Democrats should be much less concerned with Roberts’s “personal views” and much more concerned with his character, with whether he has the intent and the ability to recognize that on occasion the law compels a result that is at odds with his preferences.

But then the Democrats, as further evidence of their erring ways, never ask me….