But if one is interested in maintaining the historic, more neutral judicial model, one could do worse than to consider qualified candidates who, like Justices Kennedy and O'Connor, have critics on the left and on the right.
Justice Antonin Scalia, Kavanaugh's self-professed judicial model and conservatives' most revered jurist, demonstrated such convenient inconsistency throughout his career.
In an answer to the senators about his judicial role models, he wrote, "I admire the judicial restraint of Holmes and Brandeis, the intellectual rigor of Frankfurter, the common sense and pragmatism of Jackson, the vision of John Marshall".
How can a judicial-appointment model possibly be "normal" if it cannot explain Justices Earl Warren, William H. Rehnquist, Tom C. Clark, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Byron R. White and many others who did not have previous service as a judge?
More foreign investment to boost Mexico's flagging energy output; cuts in over-generous public pensions; a more efficient, "adversarial" judicial system modelled on America's; and of course, better education.This is a contest not of ideas, then, but of personalities and party machines.
Dirk Olin writes that "states should embrace the federal model" of judicial appointment, as preferable to judicial elections ("Courting the Public," Op-Ed, March 2).
"The opportunity is here now for us to fashion a new model for judicial selection in the states," said Alfred P. Carlton Jr., chairman of an American Bar Association committee on judicial independence who is in line to be the association's president next year.
The overwhelming scholarly assessment is that the ruling in Bush v. Gore is a poor model of judicial reasoning.
In its deference to legislative history and to Congress, the opinion is also a model of judicial restraint.
Legal scholars identified glaring inconsistencies in what the government had trumpeted as a model of judicial exactitude.
But how fair is this?Dylan Matthews offers a useful overview of the political-science literature on the "attitudinal model" of judicial decision-making.
