Judges
While acid-dropping leftists on campus and in the media have been ranting and raving about this, that, or the other thing, Prez Bush and the GOP caucus in the U.S. Senate have been stacking various federal appeals courts with so many conservatives they’ll be issuing anti-leftist rulings 20-30 years after the Dean/Kos blocs finally graduate.
One of those courts is the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals – on which the Prez/Senate have placed seven jurists.
Two of those judges are Jeffrey Sutton and John Rogers.
Judge Sutton once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He then represented the State of Ohio as a state solicitor.
Judge Rogers spent 30 years in the U.S. Army Reserves. He made his legal bones working in Prez Ford’s Department of Justice.
The Senate confirmed Rogers in November 2002. Yeah, right after the MediaCrats got Foleyed in those mid-terms. Sutton was confirmed in April 2003.
In this case, Judge Rogers found that strip searches conducted of high school students were unconstitutional, but that because case law at the time they were undertaken was not cut-and-dried on that point the school districts were immune from liability. Judge Sutton reversed the denial of the school district’s summary judgment motion and ordered that summary judgment to be granted [Ed. note: practicing civil litigators reading this will know just how rarely *that* happens; once in a blue moon].
Here Judge Rogers threw out a claim that challenged a federal Bureau of Prisons’ policy change regarding the custody dispositions of incarcerated crime-bots.
In this case, Judge Sutton addressed claims made against a local school district based upon its adoption of a dress code for middle school students.
The money quote:
It is not lost on us that, in the eyes of a 12 year-old, ‘look[ing] nice’ and ‘feel[ing] good’ about the clothing one wears are important and, rightly or wrongly, may be enough to make or break a kid’s day. Style and taste in clothing, it also is true, may be one of the first ways in which children learn to express their individuality and engage in self-expression. And, as every parent knows (or will soon learn), it is often through choices in clothing that children first learn how to challenge authority, though usually authority in the form of their parents, not their school (which perhaps is the reason why parents urge schools to adopt dress codes in the first place).
Even so, the First Amendment does not protect such vague and attenuated notions of expression – namely, self-expression through any and all clothing that a 12 year-old may wish to wear on a given day.
* * *
To rule otherwise not only would erase the requirement that expressive conduct have an identifiable message but also would risk depreciating the First Amendment in cases in which a ‘particularized message’ does exist.
Indeed.
Neither Judge Sutton nor Judge Rogers are bleeding heart “librulz,” that’s quite clear.
Judge Sutton is 45 years old. Judge Rogers is 57.
They’ll be issuing rulings along those lines for decades, Chomsky.
Decades.
— Jayson