Judiciary Committee

Under intense grilling from Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) this afternoon, Judge Sonia Sotomayor was forced to confront directly her words in various speeches to minority law students over the past two decades in which she said that gender and ethnicity can affect how a judge views a case, and may in some situations affect the [...]

Though Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) won’t say whether he’ll vote for or against Sonia Sotomayor, he used his opening statement to take a shot at the Democrats for blocking the confirmation of Miguel Estrada in 2003 — the Latino he said he’d prefer — and made clear that although he respects that President Obama won [...]

Legal bloggers are abuzz about Sen. Arlen Specter’s (D-Pa.) swipe at Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in an exacting letter (pdf) Specter sent to nominee Sonia Sotomayor earlier this week about the kind of questions he plans to ask at her confirmation hearing.
As Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog writes: “Though the letter is [...]

Following up on my earlier post about how Attorney General Eric Holder dodged Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D-Wis.) questions at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on warrantless wiretapping, Feingold just put out this statement:
I was disappointed by Attorney General Holder’s unwillingness to repeat what both he and President Obama had stated in the past – [...]

Avid observers of the circus surrounding Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court may be interested to know that her answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s questionnaire were completed in record time and are now available here on the Judiciary Committee’s Website — all 172 pages of them.
My own quick perusal hasn’t revealed anything [...]

The House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on the Justice Department is off to a good start, with Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) listing the questions he plans to put to the featured witness, Attorney General Eric Holder.
Conyers promised to question Holder about all the hot-button topics that have dominated the news and prompted questioning from Democrats [...]

David Luban, a law professor and expert on legal ethics at Georgetown University, just called the torture memos written by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel “a legal train wreck.”
“The rules of professional ethics forbid lawyers from counseling or assisting clients in illegal conduct,” Lujan, the first witness testifying at today’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee [...]

While we’re all duly praising Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) for calling a hearing next Wednesday on the torture memos, I’m still puzzled by one thing: why isn’t the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts calling the authors of the memos to explain how and why they reached their legal conclusions despite clearly [...]

Who knew we were supposed to have a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board?  Not Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, apparently.
A question about why that board — recommended by the 9/11 Commission and created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 — still doesn’t exist appeared to stump her at the Senate [...]

To follow up on my earlier post about Sen. Pat Leahy’s (D-Vt.) refusal to hold hearings on the torture memos as chair of the Judiciary Committee, we now learn, as Spencer just wrote, that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has boldly taken the reins, using the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, which he chairs, [...]