Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Judge Alito and "One Person-One Vote."

This week I thought I'd go ahead and post links to a few different items I've seen in recent weeks about Judge Alito and his apparent stance on the "one-person, one-vote" doctrine. So far it's not really apparent what Judge Alito necessarily thinks about this doctrine, except that

[a]s widely reported, in a job application for a Justice Department position in the Reagan White House Alito wrote the following statement, "In college, I developed a deep interest in constitutional law, motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment."


(The above quote was taken from ACS Blog today.)

What I have not yet seen anywhere is any kind of discussion or speculation about what Judge Alito might have meant by the statement. As Election Law Blog has suggested, the statement, standing alone and with no other context, may or may not mean that Judge Alito is opposed to equal voting rights; it might mean just that he disagreed with the Warren Court's resolution of some of the cases, as has been the case with at least one prior Federal Court nominee who similarly criticized the reapportionment cases.

If you have thoughts, post them in the comments. If you have links to other articles on this particular subject (not just general pro or con Alito stuff), post that as well. Especially if you have any links to anything that explains what Judge Alito's stance might, more specifically, be.

***FOLLOWUP 12/1***
Apparently I wasn't the only one considering this issue. Yesterday Richard Hasen posted an article on findlaw considering this very topic. And apparently Senator Arlen Specter has advised Alito that he should be prepared to answer questions on this topic during his confirmation hearings.
***FOLLOWUP 12/1***

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks to anyone who has stopped by here, despite my lack of posts in the past month. Special thanks, however, to "John" from ACS blog and Judge Alito from his personal blog for taking the time to say hi and welcome me to the blogosphere.

Update on the blog-roll.

For now my main purpose in creating this blog is to provide a good blog-roll of the best legal blogs (blawgs) on the 'net. I'm striving for good general legal news blawgs, appellate and SCOTUS-specific blawgs, blawgs featuring law professors, and "entertaining" legal blawgs. I'm striving for a good balance of conservative, liberal, and non-partisan blawgs. A couple of quick updates to the current blog-roll are in order.

First, as followers of legal blawgs are no doubt aware by now, "Underneath Their Robes" is (at least temporarily) off-line. (See the New Yorker article exposing the previously anonymous author of the blog: New Yorker Jeffrey Toobin Article.) Clicking on the link right now takes you to a log-in screen. I'm leaving the link up for now until some definitive information is out there about the future of the blog. **UPDATE(11/29)**: There's at least a rumor right now that David Lat (the previously anonymous author of UTR) might have a book deal in the works. **UPDATE(11/29)**

I noticed this week that my link to The Washington Note was inadvertently a link to one of the blawg's archive pages. So I fixed that and linked to the main page now.

Finally, I'm adding a section to the blog-roll for "Legal Resources" to provide links to miscellaneous sites that provide good legal resources, such as research materials, etc. The first two sites to go in that section are Findlaw, a good general multi-purpose resource, and Harvard Law Review, now available online in .pdf format.