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The Jesuit Post, July 11, 2016
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<h4 style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-bottom: 0px; direction: ltr; font-family: Lato, Helvetica, Arial, san-serif; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; line-height: 1.4; font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 252);">
Nathaniel Romano, SJ, <a href="https://thejesuitpost.org/">The Jesuit Post </a></h4>
<p>“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” So wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his magisterial treatment, The Common Law, nearly 140 years ago. More and more, it becomes apparent that so much of our legal system — our justice system — reflects not (simply) abstract norms of perfection, but, rather, concrete and messy realities.</p>
<p>The best example of the law’s life in experience on the Supreme Court now is the developing jurisprudence of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, particularly in dissent, and with a particular focus on criminal justice. Hers is a jurisprudence, as Adam Liptak noted in the New York Times, “informed as much by events in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 as by those in Philadelphia in 1787.”</p>
<p>To see this jurisprudence in action, we need look no further than her dissenting opinion in the case of Utah v. Strieff, No. 14-1373 579 U.S. ___ (June 20, 2016). Here, the Court divided 5-3 on the question of whether prosecutors could use evidence seized after an illegal stop, where a valid arrest warrant also existed that was unrelated to the illegal stop. The majority held that the warrant was an independent variable that legitimated the seizure, even though law enforcement had no basis to stop the defendant. Arrest warrants are often issued for relatively minor offenses, moreover minority communities are disproportionately subjected to such warrants and police supervision. These facts only add to the disquieting reality of violence at the hands of law enforcement in those communities. Unfortunately, these concerns were downplayed by the majority. </p>
<p>Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, rejected this out of hand. She engaged with the reality on the ground, relying on the findings of the Department of Justice reports on Ferguson, as well as the research of Michelle Alexander reported in The New Jim Crow, and the Court’s own precedents on police stops and criminal justice. She focused on the implications from all of these sources to try and grapple with the actual reality of how police stops impact the American people. This section (beginning on page 22 of the Court’s slip opinion), is short and readable, and is worth reading in full: Justice Sotomayor is clear that a police stop is a powerful, dramatic, and possibly devastating assertion of state-sanctioned power over an individual. </p>
<p><a href="https://thejesuitpost.org/2016/07/when-canaries-cant-breathe-sotomayors-justice-from-below/">MORE>></a></p>
Nathaniel Romano, SJ, <a href="https://thejesuitpost.org/">The Jesuit Post </a></h4>
<p>“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” So wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his magisterial treatment, The Common Law, nearly 140 years ago. More and more, it becomes apparent that so much of our legal system — our justice system — reflects not (simply) abstract norms of perfection, but, rather, concrete and messy realities.</p>
<p>The best example of the law’s life in experience on the Supreme Court now is the developing jurisprudence of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, particularly in dissent, and with a particular focus on criminal justice. Hers is a jurisprudence, as Adam Liptak noted in the New York Times, “informed as much by events in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 as by those in Philadelphia in 1787.”</p>
<p>To see this jurisprudence in action, we need look no further than her dissenting opinion in the case of Utah v. Strieff, No. 14-1373 579 U.S. ___ (June 20, 2016). Here, the Court divided 5-3 on the question of whether prosecutors could use evidence seized after an illegal stop, where a valid arrest warrant also existed that was unrelated to the illegal stop. The majority held that the warrant was an independent variable that legitimated the seizure, even though law enforcement had no basis to stop the defendant. Arrest warrants are often issued for relatively minor offenses, moreover minority communities are disproportionately subjected to such warrants and police supervision. These facts only add to the disquieting reality of violence at the hands of law enforcement in those communities. Unfortunately, these concerns were downplayed by the majority. </p>
<p>Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, rejected this out of hand. She engaged with the reality on the ground, relying on the findings of the Department of Justice reports on Ferguson, as well as the research of Michelle Alexander reported in The New Jim Crow, and the Court’s own precedents on police stops and criminal justice. She focused on the implications from all of these sources to try and grapple with the actual reality of how police stops impact the American people. This section (beginning on page 22 of the Court’s slip opinion), is short and readable, and is worth reading in full: Justice Sotomayor is clear that a police stop is a powerful, dramatic, and possibly devastating assertion of state-sanctioned power over an individual. </p>
<p><a href="https://thejesuitpost.org/2016/07/when-canaries-cant-breathe-sotomayors-justice-from-below/">MORE>></a></p>