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un-enfant-immature · 6 years ago

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Korean e-commerce unicorn Coupang hires Walmart’s former global chief compliance officer

Coupang, the unicorn that is defining e-commerce in Korea, announced today that it has hired Jay Jorgensen, Walmart’s former global chief ethics and compliance officer, to serve as its general counsel and chief compliance officer. Jorgensen will relocate to Seoul for the position.

Founded in 2010, with a total of $3.4 billion raised from investors including SoftBank and a valuation of $9 billion, Coupang currently operates only in Korea, where it is the largest e-commerce player, but has offices in Seoul, Beijing, Los Angeles, Mountain View, Seattle and Shanghai.

Known for building a tech infrastructure that gives it almost complete control over delivery fulfillment, including last-mile logistics, Coupang more than doubled its revenue over the past two years to about $5 billion in 2018. The company says more than 120 million products are available on its platform and half of Koreans have downloaded its mobile app, with millions of customers ordering from Coupang more than 70 times each year.

Prior to Walmart, Jorgensen was a partner in law firm Sidley Austin LLP. Earlier, he served as a judicial law clerk for the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and a law clerk for Samuel Alito Jr. while he sat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Jorgensen told TechCrunch in a phone call that he wanted to join Coupang because of “the extent to which it is changing life in Korea. It is not just an e-commerce player, it is the e-commerce player.” The company also reminded Jorgensen of learning about Amazon and later on Alibaba in their early days, then watching them develop into the world’s biggest e-commerce players.

When a quickly growing startup unicorn hires a chief compliance officer, the obvious question is if that means a public offering is in the works. Coupang’s vice president of marketplace and customer experience, Dan Rawson, who was also on the call with TechCrunch, said the timing of company’s future IPO is “contingent on a number of factors, including everything from market conditions to company performance” and that it still sees many growth opportunities both in Korea and eventually other countries.

Rawson adds that Korea, already one of the five biggest e-commerce markets in the world, is set to become the third biggest, after only China and the United States, and there is still room for growth in the country. One of Coupang’s most important advantages is its control of the last-mile delivery and customer service experience (most packages are brought to customers by “Coupang men,” or the company’s delivery workers, while a some are performed by Coupang Flex, a peer-to-peer delivery program similar to Uber Eats).

More than four million products are available through its premium Rocket Delivery service, which, like Amazon Prime, offers faster shipment. Rocket Delivery’s options, however, are even faster than Amazon Prime’s. For example, one guarantees delivery by dawn if customers order by midnight. Rawson says Rocket Delivery has fulfilled more than one billion items since September 2018.

#TechCrunch

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duaneodavila · 7 years ago

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President Trump Interviews More Supreme Court Candidates (Including Senator Mike Lee)

Senator Mike Lee

According to a White House press pool statement issued shortly before 5 p.m., in the name of White House spokesman Raj Shah, “The President spoke to three potential Supreme Court nominees today.”

Who might they be? And does this number of three candidates from “today” include or exclude Senator Mike Lee?

As reported by the Deseret News, President Donald Trump interviewed Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, yesterday. But the news of that interview broke today.

We don’t yet know the identities of the new interviewees, but we will try to find out (as we unearthed the names of yesterday’s four in-person interviewees). We will update this story or write a new one when we have more information.

As for Senator Lee, I don’t see him as a serious contender. Nominating a politician to the Court is like waking up early to go to the gym. It sounds like a good idea, everybody talks about it, but nobody ever does it.

Yes, some great justices came out of the political world, such as Chief Justice Earl Warren, former governor of California, and Justice Hugo Black, former U.S. senator from Alabama. But it has been a long time since a politician was nominated to the Court. Even if you count Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — who served in the Arizona state legislature, but who was already a state appeals court judge by the time of her SCOTUS nomination — you’re talking about something that last happened almost 40 years ago.

And one can see why: it’s just too risky. Why put up a politician when there are so many great sitting judges to choose from?

On the bright side, Senator Lee has a great legal resume; he’s not just some politician who happens to have a law degree (cough cough, Mike Pence). After graduating from the law school of Brigham Young University, a top institution for Mormon overachievers, Mike Lee clerked for a federal district judge in Utah and then-Third Circuit Judge Samuel Alito. After a stint at Sidley Austin in D.C., he returned to Utah and served as an assistant U.S. attorney. He then worked in the administration of Governor Jon Huntsman, eventually rising to serve as the governor’s general counsel. He returned to D.C. to clerk for Justice Alito on SCOTUS, bounced back to Utah to work for the Salt Lake City of Howrey (may it rest in peace), then entered politics.

Mike Lee also comes from legal royalty. His father was U.S. Solicitor General Rex Lee, and his brother is Associate Chief Justice Thomas Lee of the Utah Supreme Court (also on the Trump shortlist).

But nominating Lee would make little sense (even though Senator Lee has said he’s open to the prospect). First, there’s no reason to remove him from the Senate, where he’s an effective member of the narrow Republican majority. Second, because of that narrow majority, he could be placed in the awkward position of having to vote for himself — permissible, but AWK-ward.

Would senatorial courtesy help win him support? Senators are sometimes supportive when their colleagues move to another branch, but here, Senator Lee has a Roe problem. The Democrats and Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have made clear that they don’t want Roe to be overruled, with Senator Collins declaring “hostility” to Roe to be a dealbreaker. But hostility is what Senator Lee has arguably expressed toward Roe. For example, here’s what he said when speaking at the 2018 March for Life:

These Americans march to protest the legal regime that sustains abortion.

The cornerstone of that crumbling edifice is Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that invented a so-called “right” to abortion in the Constitution, and in so doing stripped the unborn of their right to life.

Whether you agree or disagree with Senator Lee’s statements about Roe, it’s hard to see how he could get confirmed in light of them.

Trump interviews Sen. Mike Lee about Supreme Court opening [Deseret News] Trump interviews Sen. Mike Lee for Supreme Court vacancy [Washington Post]

Earlier:

David Lat is editor at large and founding editor of Above the Law, as well as the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].

President Trump Interviews More Supreme Court Candidates (Including Senator Mike Lee) republished via Above the Law

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weopenviews · 5 years ago

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(Bloomberg) -- Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has done his best to keep a low profile in the 13 months since one of the most polarizing Senate confirmation fights in U.S. history.From the bench, his questions have been evenhanded and his opinions have been measured. His public appearances have been rare.But Kavanaugh will be back in the spotlight when he gives the featured dinner speech on Thursday at the annual Washington convention of the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal group that helped put him on the court.The appearance, in front of an organization Kavanaugh joined in 1988 as a law student, will offer a reminder of his professional roots and help showcase the group’s success in helping load the federal courts with conservative judges -- one of President Donald Trump’s signature achievements.It will also provide a fresh indication of how the Supreme Court’s most controversial justice will navigate the raw feelings that remain after his nomination by Trump and narrow Senate confirmation in the face of sexual assault allegations.About 2,300 people are expected to attend the Antonin Scalia Memorial Dinner, a black-tie-optional event that brings legal luminaries to the cavernous Main Hall of Washington’s Union Station every year. The event will be open to the media, though broadcast coverage will be prohibited.When many Americans last saw Kavanaugh, he was at his Senate confirmation hearing angrily and tearfully denying that he had assaulted Christine Blasey Ford decades ago when both were teenagers.“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election,” Kavanaugh said, with rage that would later be lampooned by actor Matt Damon on “Saturday Night Live.”He was confirmed on a 50-48 vote.‘Gracious’ JusticeThat Brett Kavanaugh bears little resemblance to the one who now sits at one end of the Supreme Court bench, seen only by the few hundred people who typically attend its camera-free argument sessions.Kavanaugh tends to politely challenge both sides during arguments, almost always without tipping his hand on his own views. He often chats amicably with Justice Elena Kagan, who sits to his right and seems to have far more to discuss with him than with Justice Samuel Alito on her other side.“He seems quite comfortable,” said Carter Phillips, a veteran Supreme Court lawyer at Sidley Austin. “He’s very gracious, extremely well-prepared. His questions are good.”Kavanaugh’s written opinions have generally been measured. Though he has almost always voted with his conservative colleagues when the court splits along ideological lines, he has eschewed the sweeping rhetoric of Trump’s other Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch. On occasion, Kavanaugh has written separate opinions to describe his position as a limited one.“He appears more cautious and pragmatic than Gorsuch, but it’s too early to tell too much,” said Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.Kavanaugh’s colleagues have publicly welcomed him and said they don’t harbor any ill feelings.“We are all human beings, we all have pasts,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told a judicial conference in September, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Now whether things occurred or didn’t occur, all of that is irrelevant.”Female ClerksJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg praised Kavanaugh for hiring four women to serve as his law clerks for his first term, something no justice had done in any term.That decision is as close as Kavanaugh has come to publicly addressing the confirmation controversy since he joined the court.“It was all women, and I think that was not coincidental,” said Melissa Murray, a New York University law professor who testified during the confirmation hearing that she was concerned Kavanaugh would vote to overturn abortion rights. “I think it was intended to be a rebuttal to those who believe those allegations, took those allegations seriously. I think he wanted to sort of counteract the perception that might have been left after the confirmation hearing.”For the public at large, Kavanaugh remains a polarizing figure -- far more so than his longer-serving colleagues. A Marquette Law School poll conducted in September found that 32% of respondents had an unfavorable view of Kavanaugh, with 26% holding a favorable view. No other justice had an unfavorable rating higher than 23%.Though he has met privately with smaller groups, the Federalist Society speech will mark only the second time Kavanaugh has spoken publicly outside the court since the White House ceremony that followed his October 2018 confirmation. Kavanaugh appeared in May with the man he succeeded, Justice Anthony Kennedy, before a conference of judges and lawyers.Standing OvationKavanaugh’s reception at the Federalist Society event is all but certain to be positive, probably overwhelmingly so, though it’s possible he’ll face protests.“I expect he’ll get a very warm reception,” said Adler, a Federalist Society member who plans to attend.Kavanaugh got a lengthy standing ovation when he arrived for last year’s dinner, which took place less than six weeks after the Senate vote. He opted not to give a talk at that event, instead agreeing to speak this year, according to two people familiar with the planning.The Federalist Society’s executive vice president, Leonard Leo, has served as a key adviser to Trump on judicial nominations. Leo declined to be interviewed about Kavanaugh’s work on the court, saying he generally doesn’t comment on individual justices.The dinner is part of a three-day program that features speeches by Gorsuch and Attorney General Bill Barr as well as panel discussions on a plethora of legal topics.“I think it is meaningful that he’s choosing to make a debut of sorts at this particular venue,” Murray said.Chances are Kavanaugh’s speech will steer clear of any discussion of the confirmation controversy. He probably will at least touch on the judicial philosophy that made him a Federalist Society favorite in the first place. He might show the side of himself that promised at his confirmation hearing to be part of a “team of nine” on the court.“I think it will be different than it was in his last public appearance,” said Phillips with a laugh. “He is by nature a gracious and even-tempered person. I expect that that’s the way he will come across.”To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at [email protected] contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at [email protected], John Harney, Laurie AsséoFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

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maxwellyjordan · 6 years ago

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A “view” from the courtroom: “We break no new legal ground”

It’s a blustery day in Washington as the court prepares for opinions. I’m tempted to call it a “rare” Friday session, but the justices issued opinions on this equivalent Friday last term, and they did the same in 2015 with the momentous same-sex marriage decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.

In the cafeteria this morning, Jimmy Hoover, the Supreme Court reporter for Law360, has spotted Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s father, Edward Kavanaugh, who will join Kavanaugh’s mother, Martha (the original Judge Kavanaugh in the family) in the VIP section of the courtroom. Perhaps we have an opinion coming from the first-year justice.

Justice Kavanaugh announces opinion in Flowers v. Mississippi (Art Lien)

A couple of blocks away, Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, an organization that has been hammering for more Supreme Court transparency, and other witnesses are testifying at a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing on promoting ethics, accountability and transparency in the federal judiciary. Roth sees something suspect about the court’s decision to issue opinions today.

“I’m testifying before Congress tmrw. so of course there will be opinion announcements,” is the caption on his Thursday night email to Supreme Court reporters. He suggests that the reporters could cover both the hearing and today’s opinions by pointing out that it is just a nine-minute walk from the Rayburn House Office Building, where the hearing will be, to the Supreme Court building. Roth has perhaps underestimated how much Supreme Court reporters are creatures of habit who prefer to get settled at the court well before the opinions come down.

At 9:45 a.m., in the Supreme Court chamber, the public gallery is barely half full, while the bar section is wide open, with just two seats filled. But the public section will nearly fill up with some further arrivals, and the bar section will rise to six members, equaling the number of representatives from the solicitor general’s office.

Taking a seat in the front row of the bar is Jeffrey Green of Sidley Austin, a criminal-defense specialist who participated in at least one case pending decision.

The court takes the bench and Chief Justice John Roberts pauses to let everyone settle in their seats before announcing that the opinion in Flowers v. Mississippi “is delivered by Justice Kavanaugh.” It’s a slightly odd present-tense construction, but, hey, he has to do this about 70 times per term.

This capital case from Mississippi was the subject of an intense oral argument in March. Curtis Flowers, the petitioner, is accused of murdering four people at the Tardy Furniture store in small-town Winona, Miss. Flowers has been tried six times, each by the same lead prosecutor.

Flowers is black, and questions of whether black potential jurors were improperly struck by the prosecution with its peremptory challenges surround several of the trials, including the sixth one, which is the one specifically before the justices. In that trial, Flowers was convicted, and the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld his conviction, turning away his claim under Batson v. Kentucky that the state’s exercise of peremptory challenges to exclude five out of six black prospective jurors was discriminatory.

At the oral argument, Kavanaugh observed that “we can’t take the history out of the case.”

The argument also offered a rare set of questions from Justice Clarence Thomas, who elicited from the lawyer for Flowers that the defendant’s trial counsel had exercised peremptory challenges against white prospective jurors.

Today, Kavanaugh explains the procedural history, describes small town Winona, and reminds everyone about an 1880 decision, Strauder v. West Virginia, which struck down that state’s statute excluding blacks from jury service.

“The court explained that the 14th Amendment required ‘that the law in the states shall be the same as for the black as for the white.’”

But Strauder did not solve the problem of racial exclusion from jury service, Kavanaugh adds, leading to the 1986 decision in Batson.

He announces that the state did violate Batson.

“The numbers speak loudly,” he says, with the state using peremptory challenges to strike 41 of 42 black prospective jurors in the six trials combined.

“We cannot ignore that history. We cannot take that history out of the case,” he says, echoing his observation from oral argument.

Kavanaugh goes into some factors of the sixth trial in greater detail, including that the state’s peremptory challenge of one black prospective juror in particular “was motivated in substantial part by discriminatory intent.”

“In reaching that conclusion, we break no new legal ground,” he says. “We simply enforce and reinforce our decision in Batson by applying it to the extraordinary facts of this case.”

The justices had struggled a bit at oral argument to find a broader principle in the case, but this seems to be an instance in which the court has settled for error correction.

Justice Samuel Alito has a concurring opinion, and Thomas has a dissent, joined in part by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Thomas does not deliver any of his sharp dissent from the bench.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor is up next with the opinion in North Carolina Department of Revenue v. Kaestner 1992 Family Trust.

“This case is about the limits on a state’s power to tax a trust,” she says. The holding is that the presence of in-state beneficiaries alone does not empower a state to tax trust income that has not been distributed to the beneficiaries when they have no right to demand the income and are uncertain to receive it.

The opinion is unanimous, with Alito filing a concurring opinion joined by Roberts and Gorsuch.

Justice Stephen Breyer has the opinion in Rehaif v. United States, which holds that in a prosecution under a federal statute that prohibits certain categories of people from possessing firearms, the government must prove that the defendant knew he possessed a firearm and that he knew he belonged to the relevant category.

Breyer points out that “the distinction matters in this case,” because a trial court instructed a jury that it did not need to find that the defendant, Hamid Rehaif, knew he was an alien in this country unlawfully.

“We hold that the government must prove both knowledge of conduct and knowledge of status,” Breyer says. He cites Blackstone and the concept of proof of scienter.

“Take the example of an immigrant who was brought to this country as a small child,” Breyer says. “Would Congress have intended to send such a person to prison for possessing a firearm even though she did not know that she was here unlawfully? We presume that Congress does not intend to make criminals out of such persons, who lack knowledge of the facts that would make their conduct wrongful.”

Although the legal issues and posture are very different, Breyer’s choice of example brings to mind the long-pending cert petitions concerning the status of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Breyer notes that Alito has filled a dissent joined by Thomas. Jeffrey Green was on the merits brief for Rehaif in this case, and he has a look of satisfaction at the outcome today.

The chief justice announces that he has the opinion in Knick v. Township of Scott. Pennsylvania. This is the case that was argued during the first week of the term, before Kavanaugh was confirmed. In November, it was restored to the calendar for reargument, which occurred in January.

The conventional wisdom was that the court was deadlocked and needed Kavanaugh’s vote to break the tie.

Roberts explains that the case involves petitioner Rose Mary Knick’s 90-acre property in Scott Township, which includes a grazing area for horses and other animals and a small graveyard where ancestors of Knick’s neighbors “are allegedly buried.”

The phrasing adds an air of mystery to the case, and the record reflects that Knick has disputed whether there is any burial ground on her property. (We long thought that Oct. 31, a day the court held arguments last fall, would have been the more appropriate time for the initial argument in the case.)

Knick challenged a county ordinance that requires all cemeteries to be kept open and accessible to the public during daylight hours as a taking that violated the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause.

The high court took up the case to reconsider its 1985 decision in Williamson County Regional Planning Commission v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson County. That case held that a property owner whose property has been taken by a local government has not suffered a Fifth Amendment violation — and cannot bring a federal takings claim in federal court — until a state court has denied his claim for just compensation under state law.

Roberts says Knick is caught in a Catch-22 between Williamson County and a later decision, 2005’s San Remo Hotel L.P. v. City and County of San Francisco, which held that a state court’s resolution of a claim for just compensation under state law will generally preclude any federal suit.

“That should tip us off that something is wrong,” Roberts says. “We decide today that the something that is wrong is Williamson County.”

He says the balance of considerations over stare decisis “tips in favor of overruling” the state-litigation requirement of Williamson County. He does not address the sharp words of the dissent about yet another precedent being overruled, but concludes by stating that “a federal court, no less than a state court, is competent” to hear Knick’s takings claim.

He announces that Justice Elena Kagan has the dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor. Kagan does not read from her dissent. And it is now clear that Kavanaugh indeed had the decisive vote in this case.

The justices rise to depart the bench, and there is not much suspense this time in Marshal Pamela Talkin’s announcement that the court will return on Monday, because Monday is a regularly scheduled day for opinions.

There are 12 opinions left, and to paraphrase Roth, “of course there will be opinion announcements” on one or more additional days. Most of those are expected to break some legal ground.

The post A “view” from the courtroom: “We break no new legal ground” appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

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toomanysinks · 6 years ago

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Korean e-commerce unicorn Coupang hires Walmart’s former global chief compliance officer

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/14/korean-e-commerce-unicorn-coupang-hires-walmarts-former-global-chief-compliance-officer/

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fmservers · 6 years ago

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Korean e-commerce unicorn Coupang hires Walmart’s former global chief compliance officer

Via Catherine Shu https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

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Democrats have served amicably with the Utah Senator…

Deroy Murdock

(Deroy Murdock, Liberty Headlines) President Donald J. Trump is expected on Monday to unveil his Supreme Court nominee.

Given Democratic intransigence and the Republicans’ scalpel-thin Senate majority, the president’s wisest and safest bet may be a young constitutionalist conservative who would be tough for Senate Democrats to Bork: their colleague, Senator Mike Lee.

The 47-year-old Utah Republican has spent six and a half years legislating the size and scope of government, the separation of powers, and the constitutionality — or lack thereof — of everything Washington does. Equipped with these valuable lawmaking insights, Lee would be the 16th U.S. senator to become a Supreme and the most recent since FDR’s nominee Senator Hugo Black (D – Alabama). The former Klansman served the Court from 1937 to 1971.

After earning a J.D. from BYU, Lee clerked for federal judge Dee Benson and then for Samuel Alito — when Alito was a circuit-court magistrate, and again at the Supreme Court. Lee privately practiced appellate and Supreme Court litigation at Sidley & Austin. He was an assistant U.S. attorney and then general counsel to former Utah governor Jon Huntsman.

Senate Democrats would be hard-pressed to turn up their noses at Lee’s résumé.

More important, senators rarely devour each other when a fellow club member is tapped for another position. Senate Democrats would find it difficult to attack their distinguished colleague as a space-based extremist whose flying saucer just zoomed in from Planet Goldwater. Democrats have served amicably with Lee. Indeed, according to Congress.gov and ProPublica, 36 senators in the 49-person Democratic caucus (including independent Angus King of Maine and Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont) have co-sponsored bills that Lee has written.

In fact, the very first Democrat to co-sponsor a bill by Mike Lee was none other than Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York. In October 2011, Schumer put his name on S.1697, Lee’s bill to permit three-year immigration periods for foreign sheep herders, goat herders, and dairy farmers. Schumer was Lee’s only co-sponsor on this bill — from either party.

Schumer also was one of 12 Democrats to co-sponsor S.1123, Lee’s April 2015 bill to reform federal procedures related to surveillance in criminal, counterterrorism, and foreign-intelligence probes.

In addition, Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich, Massachusetts’s Ed Markey, and Montana’s Jon Tester each has co-sponsored four of Lee’s bills. Delaware’s Chris Coons has stood up for Lee on seven pieces of legislation. Vermont’s Patrick Leahy has joined forces with Lee on eight. New Jersey’s Cory Booker has co-sponsored nine of Lee’s bills.

Three more of Lee’s measures garnered impressive Democratic support:

• Twenty Democrats co-sponsored S.356, Lee’s September 2015 bill to improve the privacy of electronic communications.

• Seventeen Democrats co-sponsored S.502, Lee’s February 2015 proposal “to focus limited Federal resources on the most serious offenders.”

• Twenty-two Democrats co-sponsored S.1933. The Smarter Sentencing Act is Lee’s October 2017 version of S.502.

Mike Lee/Photo by Gage Skidmore

These well-documented facts — universally available online — can be lobbed back at Democrats if they deploy their dog-eared demonization playbook. E.g. “Senator Booker, if Mike Lee really is the reincarnation of George Wallace, why did you co-sponsor ninedifferent bills with him?” Knowing that such questions would arise, Democrats would be less likely to go DEFCON 1 against Lee. Deprived of their default demagoguery, Democrats would find their gun barrels stuffed with daisies. Good luck with that!

Conservatives should not become unglued because some of Lee’s bills have attracted significant bipartisan concurrence. Lee’s latest conservative scorecards indicate that his head is screwed on Right:

• National Taxpayers Union: 92 percent rating. (No. 1 in the Senate.)

• Club for Growth: 99 percent lifetime score

• Heritage Action for America: 99 percent lifetime record

• American Conservative Union: 99.43 percent lifetime average.

• Freedom Works: 100 percent lifetime grade.

Senator Mike Lee is a reliably conservative constitutionalist Generation Xer with whose ideas Senate Democrats repeatedly have associated themselves. It’s tough to imagine a more qualified and confirmable choice for President Trump to nominate to the United States Supreme Court.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and an emeritus media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. As a member of the conservative movement since 1979, Murdock has colluded with all of the center-Right organizations cited in this opinion piece.

Original Source -> MURDOCK: As Court Pick, Mike Lee Would be Tough to Bork

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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nancy-astorga · 8 years ago

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Meet the front-runners on Donald Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist

President Donald Trump said he plans to announce his Supreme Court pick at 8 p.m. Tuesday, and media reports indicate he has narrowed his shortlist down to two top contenders: Thomas Hardiman and Neil Gorsuch.

Trump is filling the seat left vacant after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death last February, and repeatedly said on the campaign trail he plans to nominate someone “very much in the mold” of Scalia.

But Senate Democrats, still sore over Republicans’ refusal to give a hearing to President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, have vowed to filibuster Trump’s pick regardless who is named, Politico reported Monday.

Barring any last-minute surprises on Trump’s part, the choice will likely come down one of two options: a formerly dark-horse candidate with quite possibly the inside track to score the nod, and an Ivy League-educated judge with an impeccable conservative record.

Thomas Hardiman

Hardiman, a 51-year-old judge who sits on the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals, has caught the attention of observers to fill the void left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia for several reasons.

With Democrats threatening to block Trump’s Supreme Court pick, it’s noteworthy that Hardiman was voted onto the appeals court in 2007 by a 95-0 tally. Both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, voted to approve him.

Hardiman also has the backing of Trump’s closest judicial source: his sister.

Maryanne Trump Barry, a fellow 3rd Circuit judge, holds a high opinion of Hardiman. As an adviser who spoke with the president told Politico, “Maryanne is high on Hardiman.”

And those who know the conservative judge say there’s another trait that could be attractive to Trump.

“I don’t know that I can think of anybody that seemed as down-to-earth as he is,” Carter Phillips, a Washington, DC, lawyer who has argued before the Supreme Court more than any other attorney in private practice, told Business Insider.

Phillips said he has argued a pair of cases in front of Hardiman, been a part of a few panels with the Pittsburgh-based judge, and had a handful of Hardiman’s former clerks work at his law firm, Sidley Austin.

“He’s a really nice person,” Phillips said. “I think he will be what you see is what you get on the bench. I don’t think you’re going to see anything quite like Justice Scalia in that regard — I don’t expect him to be larger than life. … He appears, by all means, to be a solid conservative.”

Hardiman, at 37, was nominated by President George W. Bush to serve on the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. He was nominated to the appeals court four years later.

A Notre Dame graduate who received his law degree from Georgetown, Hardiman would find himself in sparse company on the Supreme Court bench — each justice currently seated holds an Ivy League law degree.

As SCOTUSblog noted, Hardiman has reflected originalist opinions on Second Amendment cases. On abortion-related issues, Hardiman has not weighed in directly.

Trump promised throughout the campaign to fill the vacancy with a judge in the mold of Scalia. Those who spoke with Business Insider about Hardiman said he would likely fall somewhere between Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts ideologically.

Former US District Judge Robert Cindrich, who hired Hardiman to join his Pittsburgh firm when Hardiman moved to the city, said he “tries to be humanistic” and “tries to solve problems” in a way similar to Roberts.

“That might be somewhere where he might fit,” Cindrich told Business Insider. “For sure he’s a conservative. In his philosophies, he is a Republican, There’s no question about his conservative bona fides. He was active in the Republican Party when he came to Pittsburgh — very successful at that, by the way — so you would have to say he’d be of the conservative mold. How far, it’s very hard for me to say.

“Whether he is as strict an originalist as Justice Scalia, I can’t say,” he said. “But whether he would pay heed to the word of the Constitution, I know he will. There’s no question.”

But Cindrich, a Democrat, also said he considered Hardiman to be “sufficiently forward-thinking and thoughtful.”

Echoing Phillips’ assessment, Cindrich said Hardiman is the consummate “people person.”

“[It’s] one of the reasons he was so successful as a district judge,” Cindrich said. “He wasn’t there very long. They picked him out as a star, which he was, and got him to [that] circuit court appointment.”

Phillips said Hardiman’s clerks say they “love him.”

“But they also say he’s open-minded, likes to talk through the issues, stays engaged with them after they complete their clerkship,” he said. “From my perspective, he’ll likely be pro-business, and he’ll be a lot like Justice Scalia in terms of his overall approach to the cases. I think he’ll probably be good for most of my clients.”

Like Cindrich, Phillips said he expects Hardiman would fall somewhere between Alito and Roberts ideologically and that he would be surprised if the judge ended up closer to the more moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy.

“At least based on everything I’ve read on him — which I won’t say is that much, I won’t start reading a judge’s opinions until I have a nominee in hand — everything I’ve heard about him and read about him suggests he will be a solid conservative,” Phillips said. “The same way I knew that Merrick Garland was going to be a solid liberal if his nomination hadn’t stalled.”

Phillips said it was “probably not an unfair comparison” to make that Hardiman would be for the right what Garland, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was nominated early last year by President Barack Obama for Scalia’s vacancy, was for the left.

Hardiman is joined on the Trump administration’s list of finalists by 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch and 11th Circuit Judge Bill Pryor. Trump initially said he would announce the nomination on Thursday, but after a weekend firestorm surrounding his executive order that temporarily bars people immigrating to the US from seven Muslim-majority countries, the announcement was moved up to Tuesday night.

Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, a group that plans to go to bat for Trump’s eventual nominee and spend millions to help get that person confirmed, told Business Insider that it seems as if there is a new front-runner for the vacancy with each passing day.

“You know, yesterday was Gorsuch’s day. Today is Hardiman. Tomorrow, we’ll probably be on [7th Circuit Judge] Diane Sykes,” she said.

She insisted that Hardiman would be an “excellent choice” for the vacancy and would fulfill Trump’s promise of picking a judge akin to Scalia. But Severino added that she feels “like an Ivy League admissions office” with what she believes are a litany of great conservative choices being reported as under consideration.

“You’ve got all these people with 4.0s and 1600 SAT scores,” Severino said. “You can kind of pick which flavor, and they’d all be great choices. That, I think, is the president’s task, but it’s a great problem to have.”

Neil Gorsuch

As President Donald Trump whittles down his short-list for a Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, who serves on the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, has emerged as one of the likely selections.

Trump tweeted on Monday that he’d announce his pick on Tuesday.

He told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Thursday that he had mostly finished deciding.

“I have made my decision pretty much in my mind, yes,” Trump said. “That’s subject to change at the last moment, but I think this will be a great choice.”

Media reports have indicated Trump has narrowed his list to three candidates: Gorsuch, William Pryor, and Thomas Hardiman.

Trump said during his campaign that he would seek to “appoint judges very much in the mold of Justice [Antonin] Scalia” — a characteristic that Gorsuch embodies in particular.

In a speech to Case Western Reserve University’s law school shortly after Scalia’s death in February 2016, Gorsuch praised Scalia for his unyielding textualism — interpreting a law according to its plain text, rather than considering the intent of the lawmakers or the consequences of its implementation.

Gorsuch said Scalia’s greatest achievement was perhaps his emphasis on the differences between legislators, who, he said, use the law according to their own morals and ambitions for society’s future, and judges, who “should do none of these things in a democratic society.”

“Judges should instead strive, if humanly and so imperfectly, to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be,” Gorsuch said.

Scalia’s method of statutory interpretation was done “correctly” and was undoubtedly a “success,” according to Gorsuch, who quoted Scalia as saying: “If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.”

Similarly, Gorsuch also supports originalism, meaning he seeks to interpret the law according to the meaning of the Constitution as it was written. Gorsuch would frequently ask his clerks to scour historical sources when a constitutional issue arose in a case, David Feder, one of his former clerks, wrote in a blog post for the Yale Journal on Regulation.

“‘We need to get this right,’ was the motto — and right meant ‘as originally understood,'” Feder said.

Gorsuch, who at 49 would be the youngest justice on the current Supreme Court bench, comes with a prestigious academic and legal background, as well as staunchly conservative credentials.

He graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Supreme Court justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. A Denver native, Gorsuch was appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush to the federal appeals court for the 10th circuit. He worked in the administration’s Justice Department before his appointment.

Like Scalia, Gorsuch has become known for his writing style, which is often infused with his wit and personality. But, in a departure from the famously combative justice, Gorsuch has a reputation for projecting an easygoing demeanor — a trait that could work in his favor during confirmation hearings in which Democrats have vowed to fight “tooth and nail.”

“I think the conservatives will love him and the liberals will find very little to fault,” Mark Hansen, a former partner of Gorsuch’s at Kellogg Huber Hansen, told CNN. “He’s an affable, collegial, unpretentious man with a good sense of humor.”

Gorsuch is also known for his votes and opinions in favor of religious liberty. In perhaps his most notable case, he sided with claimants Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor, who argued that their religious beliefs were violated by the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate.

The government must not force those with “sincerely held religious beliefs” to be complicit in “conduct their religion teaches to be gravely wrong,” Gorsuch wrote in his opinion.

The case went to the Supreme Court in 2014. In a 5-4 vote, it came to the same decision as Gorsuch.

In criminal law, too, Gorsuch applies a textualist interpretation and often sides with defendants over prosecutors in an effort to avoid criminalizing conduct that could potentially be innocent.

In one 2013 case, for instance, Gorsuch upheld a lower court’s ruling that a police officer in Lafayette, Colorado, who used a stun gun on 22-year-old Ryan Wilson, who died from the incident, had qualified immunity, The Denver Post reported.

According to Gorsuch, all officers were protected under broadly applied qualified-immunity laws, with the exception of “the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”

Gorsuch has also been a staunch opponent of what he calls “executive overreach,” a position that could appease many Republicans who criticized the Obama administration’s use of executive orders to cut through congressional gridlock, while also reassuring Democrats worried about the ramifications of Trump’s executive orders.

Executive bureaucracies, according to Gorsuch, “concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers’ design.”

“Maybe the time has come to face the behemoth,” he wrote.

In keeping with Republican tradition, Gorsuch leans in favor of state power over federal power — an approach that can be challenging in civil-rights cases that frequently revolve around the power of “rogue” state laws, Justin Marceau, a University of Denver law professor, told The Denver Post.

“We would see a judge who, while perhaps not as combative in personal style as Justice Scalia, is perhaps his intellectual equal,” Marceau said, “and almost certainly his equal on conservative jurisprudential approaches to criminal justice and social justice issues that are bound to keep coming up in the country.”

SEE ALSO: As Trump readies to announce Supreme Court pick, one judge emerges as top candidate

DON’T MISS: Meet Judge Neil Gorsuch — a front-runner for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee

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books0977 · 5 years ago

Photo

Lady in Black (1881). Samuel Sidley (British, 1829-1896). Oil on canvas.

Sidley first studied art in the school of art at Manchester. Subsequently he came to London and was admitted to the schools of the Royal Academy. In 1855 he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy. He became chiefly known as a successful portrait-painter, and gained frequent commissions for official and presentation portraits.

#art #portrait #Samuel Sidley #British

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nancy-astorga · 8 years ago

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As Trump readies to announce Supreme Court pick, one judge emerges as top candidate

President Donald Trump announced Monday morning that he had settled on a nominee for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court, and one formerly dark-horse candidate has emerged as the judge with quite possibly the inside track to score the nod.

Thomas Hardiman, a 51-year-old judge who sits on the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals, has caught the attention of observers to fill the void left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia for several reasons.

With Democrats threatening to block Trump’s Supreme Court pick, it’s noteworthy that Hardiman was voted onto the appeals court by a 95-0 tally. Both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, voted to approve him.

Hardiman also has the backing of Trump’s closest judicial source: his sister.

Maryanne Trump Barry, a fellow 3rd Circuit judge, holds a high opinion of Hardiman. As an adviser who spoke with the president told Politico, “Maryanne is high on Hardiman.”

And those who know the conservative judge say there’s another trait that could be attractive to Trump.

Hardiman, at 37, was nominated by President George W. Bush to serve on the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. He was nominated to the appeals court four years later.

A Notre Dame graduate who received his law degree from Georgetown, Hardiman would find himself in lonesome territory on the bench. Each justice seated on the Supreme Court except Ruth Bader Ginsburg received their law degree from either Harvard or Yale.

As SCOTUSblog noted, Hardiman has reflected originalist opinions on Second Amendment cases. On abortion-related issues, Hardiman has not weighed in directly.

“Whether he is as strict an originalist as Justice Scalia, I can’t say,” he said. “But whether he would pay heed to the word of the Constitution, I know he will. There’s no question.”

But Cindrich, a Democrat, also said he considered Hardiman to be “sufficiently forward-thinking and thoughtful.”

Echoing Phillips’ assessment, Cindrich said Hardiman is the consummate “people person.”

Phillips said that Hardiman’s clerks say they “love him.”

Like Cindrich, Phillips said that he expects Hardiman would fall somewhere between Alito and Roberts ideologically and that he would be surprised if the judge ended up closer to the more moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Phillips said it was “probably not an unfair comparison” to make that Hardiman would be to the right what Garland, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge who was nominated early last year by President Barack Obama for Scalia’s vacancy, was to the left.

Hardiman is joined on the list of finalists by 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch and 11th Circuit Judge Bill Pryor. Trump initially said he would announce the nomination on Thursday, but after a weekend firestorm surrounding his executive order aimed at temporarily banning travel into the US from seven Muslim-majority countries, the announcement was moved up to Tuesday night.

“You know, yesterday was Gorsuch’s day. Today is Hardiman. Tomorrow, we’ll probably be on [7th Circuit Judge] Diane Sykes,” she said.

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