Arizona Gov. nominates Clint Bolick to state Supreme Court

And Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress is not happy, calling it "chilling".

http://ift.tt/1PfDI3D

Quote:
In 1991, Bolick co-founded the Institute for Justice (IJ), possibly the most savvy anti-government litigation shop in the country. One of IJ’s core strategies is to find genuinely sympathetic plaintiffs who are harmed by economic regulations that sound ridiculous on their face, and then use them as vehicles to push sweeping changes to legal doctrine that mirror limits on state power repudiated during the New Deal. As Bolick notes in his not-so-subtly named book Death Grip: Loosening the Law’s Stranglehold over Economic Liberty, one of his early cases involved a businessman who tried to start a cab company that served a low-income neighborhood, but then got tripped up by licensing regulations that are hard to defend as good policy.
I've donated to IJ, which does good work. They were also the lead attorneys for the homeowner in the Kelo eminent-domain case. So, anyway, what's the problem with suing to overturn regulations "that are hard to defend as good policy"?

Quote:
Yet these sympathetic plaintiffs are often cat’s paws for a much more sweeping agenda seeking to invalidate much of American law. In Death Grip (which, it’s worth noting, Bolick published after leaving IJ), the incoming justice praises the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Lochner v. New York, a 1905 case that is often taught in law schools as an example of how judges should never behave. “Lochner,” Bolick writes, “is a celebration of freedom of enterprise and freedom of contract, and a repudiation of government paternalism and excessive regulation. It reflects a careful and proper balancing of freedom and the state’s power.”
Millhiser is worried that this appointment positions Bolick as a nominee for a US Supreme Court Justice slot if a Republican is elected in 2016 (presumably not Donald Trump, who supported the trampling of Susette Kelo's rights along with his fellow liberals).


Arizona Gov. nominates Clint Bolick to state Supreme Court