Getting to know your Justices, and yourself.

This semester has felt very different from all of last year. There was something so intense about the One-L year, as if all of life was wrapped up in law school. I am still studying a lot, but last year at this time I do not remember ever forgetting that I was at law school. I worked last Friday; I went out to dinner tonight; I watched a movie last night, and during all of those activities, I kind of felt like I was just living like a normal human being. Sure, I have not had a weekend where I did not study for at least 4-5 hours per day, but I am not behaving all that different than I would if I was simply working. I guess this means I am “thinking like a lawyer” – working on weekends – and that I have learned to find some balance in my life.

As to the law and my life, I learned recently that a former Supreme Court Justice came from my hometown and went to college at my alma mater, the University of Colorado: Justice Byron White. That is about where our similarities end. He was a professional football player with the nickname of “the whizzer,” and he tended to vote with the more conservative wing of the court–he joined Rehnquist in dissenting in Roe v. Wade. As a Kennedy appointee, he is further proof that you never quite know what you are going to get with a justice. O’Conner, who wrote the Casey opinion essentially upholding Roe was appointed by Reagan, so for people who are freaking out about the two new appointees to the court, history tells us to just wait and see; often justices do not act on the bench as we think they might. Still, in my inquiry into the personalities of the Supreme Court, I was excited to see that Fort Fun had produced a SCOTUS justice (Supreme Court of the United States). After learning that the rumor of Kip Winger growing up in Fort Collins was untrue, he grew up in Denver, I did not think there were any famous people from our little outpost on the boundary between the mid-west and the west. Around Seattle, everyone talks of their golden judicial child, Justice William O. Douglas– a decidedly more liberal justice.

Heeding my own words, supra, I do not want to simply reduce any justice to a single categorical description of liberal or conservative. One thing I have learned this year is that most Constitutional law questions are more complicated than a simple either/or category. By the time a conflict has moved its way through the lower courts, it has been stripped of much of the detritus of the individual facts, but unhinged from those facts, what remains is often a very difficult to answer question, such as trying to figure out what is meant my “liberty” in the 14^th Amendment’s “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” With such a daunting task, it is good that the court has justices with different perspectives and a good sense of humor.