Bush Chooses Roberts. Again.

How do you introduce chief justice nominee John Roberts to your readers all over again? In Charles Lane's A1 story*, we have an absorbing account of Roberts' affinity for the "Legal Process School," which to my untrained brain sounds like "what does the law say about this case?"

The strength of Legal Process was its insistence that courts adhere to neutral principles, that they "should not become champions of particular causes or litigants," as Dennis J. Hutchinson, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, puts it.

Yet Legal Process has lost influence in more recent years, under attack from a new generation of law professors who fault it for ignoring the political power relationships embedded in the law -- that its insistence on identifying neutral principles is unrealistic.

"The question about legal process," Rakoff says, "is 'Is it true that there are legal answers that aren't political answers?' "

Some liberals are more frank than others about the courts being a political tool, and Legal Process is the rebuke against it. Interesting story.

By the way, Roberts probably doesn't hate black people:

Roberts grew up in a mostly white Indiana suburb where his father's steel company was touched by federal court battles over affirmative action, and he attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School as Boston was grappling, sometimes violently, with court-ordered school desegregation.

But his gravitation to concepts of judicial restraint probably reflected the natural bent of his orderly, traditionalist mind, rather than the controversies swirling outside the academic setting in which he spent most of the 1970s.

Probably.

*subhed: Roberts Was Influenced by Critics of the Warrent Court