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Show not make thee any graven image, . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: . . ." *» Deut. 5:8, Oasis Books 753-8697 halt cut and it'jlc Iff IFF (all id 4>i nalti •Nvith Lori) Ffc. 7XHB1D USU Students Make Healthy Choices From the Utah Higher Education Health Behavior Survey 2005 "So long at the court vitwt Itself « uttlmattly mpomlble for gowning all aspects of our iodtty, ft will, understandably, be overworked. ' Academics Come First! 94% of USU students did not experience poor test/project performance due to the use of alcohol/drugs. 97% of USU students did not experience trouble with police or college authorities due to the use of alcohol/drugs. 93% of USU students have not missed a class due to alcohol/drug use. 93% of USU students have not had memory loss due to alcohol/drug use. 883% ofUSU Students are aware oftlie Student Code, or USU's alcohol'drug policies! Are you one of them? 80% of USU Students support stricter discipline Tor drug/alcohol violations! "... the lowest bidder didn't get tin contract, not btcoute somebody dse hud a boiler product, but because of the race of the owner of anothtr company. You doni overcome radsm by engaging In It yourself.' [the majority's] approach In iWi can leads to the result thai nguiating the toklngotahopleutoadthat, (orreaiont of Its own, llvn Its entire life In California constitutes regulating commerce... among the leveral ttotmt. ..«e"_:«.Ki* ..• *•-. . * . untt [Mils Healthy BeUefs Like Rehnquist, Roberts is a skeptic on judicial intervention 70.% of USU students believe that alcohol is NOT necessary to "break the ice." 73% of USU students believe alcohol does NOT enhance social activity. 86% of USU students believe that alcohol does NOT make stress easier to deal with. 77.% of USU students say alcohol does NOT help them facilitate connections with their peers. 83% of USU students say they do NOT need alcohol to have more fun BY CHARLES LANE The Washington Post Safe and Healthy Behavior 91% of USU students wear their seatbelts always or most oftlie time. 93% of USU students did not engage in a physical fight in the past year. 83% of USU students have never smoked a cigarette and 93.1% have never chewed. tobacco. 94% of USU students have not had 5 or more drinks in one sitting in the past two weeks. Removing the nondrinkers, the average number of drinks consumed by USU students is 3.11 per week. "We totttlnue to betievethat Roe was wrongly decided and should be ove For more information contact: The Student Wellness Center 850E 1200 N North of Romney Stadium Room 119 435-797-1010 A en loving Wellness Tttrougft Balance in JXIi Jkrcas of M-ifc PORTS BETTING COM www.sportsbetting.com and a trip to the Pm Football All-Star Hawaii A Plus, these exciting prizes await you! • Sony GO" LCD Projection TV • BOSE Home Theatre System • HP iPAQ Color Pocket PC • Apple. iPod PLAY FOR FREE AT http://www.sportsbetting.com sm <P 2003-200S Roal Entertainment Lid. No purchoao nowmafy to enter or win. Void whero prohibited by law. Must b« at least 18 yoan old to play. WASHINGTON — From his youthful days as a Reagan administration aide to his current job as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, John G. Roberts Jr. has consistently espoused a clear view of federal judicial intervention: Less is more. This same principle was held dear by the man Roberts served as a Supreme Court clerk, the late William H. Rehnquist—whose former position as chief justice of the United States is now suddenly within Roberts' grasp. In the quarter-century since he served as Rehnquist's aide, Roberts has made an instinctual and deeply held conservatism plain at nearly every turn. As a young Reagan administration aide, he registered his skepticism toward court-recognized "fundamental rights," such as the right to privacy. Earlier this year, Judge Roberts voted to permit President Bush to subject terrorism suspects to military trials at Guantanamo Bay. The question—more urgent now since Bush nominated him this week to lead the high court—is where Roberts' vision of judicial restraint would lead him on the most volatile issues. The woman Roberts was originally tapped to replace, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, sometimes displayed her conservatism by bowing to precedents on social issues—notably Roe v. Wade@, which established a right to abortion rooted in a right to privacy. Rehnquist labored mightily to reverse some rulings on abortion and the rights of criminal defendants that he thought were wrongly decided in the first place. To Roberts' supporters, his history suggests he will be a careful and principled leader of the federal judiciary, one who would restore the true constitutional balance of power between the courts and the people's elected representatives in Congress, the White House and the states. To his opponents, it suggests a willingness to leave the constitutional rights of women and minorities unprotected against violations by the more political branches of government. What is unmistakable from Roberts' record, however, is that his essential philosophy about the role of courts in American life is strongly held. There is little prospect that the 50-year-old judge will be any less likely to press his beliefs in conference with colleagues on the court than he was to promote them in memos to his elders in the Reagan administration. Sounding very much like the 26-year-old aide who ghostwrote articles and speeches on judicial restraint for President Reagan's Justice Department, Roberts told the Senate firmly in a written submission last month that federal judges "do not have a commission to solve society's problems, as they see them, but simply to decide cases before them according to the rule of law." The Primacy of Process Roberts has said that defining the proper boundaries of judicial review is a "central problem" of American government. Few legal analysts of any ideological stripe would dispute that. Throughout history, the Supreme Court has provoked controversy by using its power to declare laws unconstitutional in ways that critics saw as overstepping its authority. President Jefferson condemned the 1803 Marbury v. Madison@ decision that established the doctrine of judicial review. The Dred Scott case of 1857—which declared that black people were "beings of an inferior order" and that congressional efforts to restrict slavery in Northern territories were a violation of property rights—discredited the institution for a generation. A series of rulings striking down state and federal economic regulations provoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "court-packing" plan, until the justices backed down and began upholding New Deal legislation. In the 1950s and '60s, the Supreme Court looked at the country's problems and decided, time and again, that the federal judiciary should reform society and establish individual rights. Even today, long after the death of the chief justice, Earl Warren, who led the court during that period, and long after a majority of the court has been named by Republican presidents who opposed the Warren Court's innovations, the court continues to recognize such Warren-like concepts as a "fundamental right" to privacy that protects abortion and private consensual homosexual conduct. The Warren revolution remains a model for many people of how the court must act as a guarantor of individual and minority rights. Roberts, however, was one of those who recoiled from the Warren Court's activism. Roberts grew up in a mostly white Indiana suburb where his father's steel company was touched by federal court battles over affirmative action, and he attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School as Boston was grappling, sometimes violently, with court-ordered school desegregation. But his gravitation to concepts of judicial restraint probably reflected the natural bent of his orderly, traditionalist mind, rather than the controversies swirling outside the academic setting in which he spent most of the 1970s. Asked by a senator in 2003 to name the legal text that most influenced him, Roberts chose the 1973 edition of Hart & Wechsler's "The Federal Courts and the Federal System," a 1,657-page legal textbook used in Harvard's class on federal courts. It has always been "within reach of my desk" since law school, he told the Senate. And, indeed, he has often cited it in his writings since Cambridge. Unknown to most Americans, the Hart & Wechsler volume is instantly recognizable to law professors as an exhaustive, sophisticated— and deeply skeptical—treatment of the Warren Court revolution. It is considered a virtual Bible of a postwar legal movement known as the Legal Process School, especially influential at Harvard, whose leading figures were liberals and conservatives who professed concern not so much for the results the court was reaching as for the damage its overreaching might do to the judiciary's own legitimacy. Roberts' choice of the book is "extremely revealing," said Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago. For the Legal Process School, it was a given that "judges in solving legal problems are not doing the same thing that legislators are doing in solving political problems," says Todd Rakoff, a professor of law at Harvard. The strength of Legal Process was its insistence that courts adhere to neutral principles, that they "should not become champions of particular causes or litigants," as Dennis J. Hutchinson, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, puts it. Yet Legal Process has lost influence in more recent years, under attack from a new generation of law professors who fault it for ignoring the political power relationships embedded in the law—that its insistence on identifying neutral principles is unrealistic. "The question about legal process," Rakoff says, "is Ts it true that there are legal answers that aren't political answers?' " A Closet Activist? That, in essence, is the critique liberals are raising about Roberts' jurisprudence today: that his insistence on a limited role for the federal courts is a cover for conservative policy preferences. Announcing its opposition to Roberts, the Alliance for Justice said that Roberts supports "weakening women's rights and civil rights, laws, cutting back the vital role of our courts in enforcing legal protections and restricting the ability of the people's democratically elected representatives to enact crucial, nationwide worker, anti-discrimination and environmental safeguards." Court conservatives such as Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have also espoused judicial restraint. Yet that has not prevented them from striking down many federal and state statutes, often on the basis of a states'-rights doctrine that dissenting justices on the court have criticized as too loosely based in constitutional text. The accusation that Roberts is capable of his own brand of activism has not come exclusively from liberal advocacy groups. On the D.C. Circuit, he wrote an opinion for a 2-to-l majority in which he interpreted a law to deny a former Amtrak employee the right to • ROBERTS/REHNQUIST see page 23 |