The pointy-headed legal eagles opine

By Aussiegirl

Just to give them equal time -- here are some opinions from the Legal Times -- note particularly staunch conservative Bruce Fein's take on the matter:

Law.com

"It's not enough to pick a result, though that's important," says University of Texas Law School professor Douglas Laycock, a longtime scholar of the Court's church-state cases. "It's the quality of thinking and analysis that really matter. You have to have judgment that translates into decisions that lower courts can follow and make sense of." Laycock is reserving judgment on Miers, but for now thinks she seems "grossly underprepared" for the job she faces.

University of Chicago Law School professor Geoffrey Stone posed a similar concern in a Chicago Tribune column last week: "The goal (of a justice) is not just to vote, but to bring a high level of wisdom, experience, principle and intellect to the process of judging. It is no place for rank amateurs."

And Stone made it clear he thinks Miers is a rank amateur, asserting that she is far less qualified even than Richard Nixon nominee G. Harrold Carswell, who was rejected ignominiously by the Senate in 1970.

Bruce Fein of the Lichfield Group in Washington is more conservative than either Laycock or Stone, but he shares their concern -- and takes it one step further. A key warrior in the conservative battle for the judiciary for the past 25 years, Fein thinks Miers is so dismally unqualified that she won't even vote the way Bush wants.

"She's an inkblot -- the last person who is going to look at Roe v. Wade and say, 'the reasoning is flawed,' and tell us why," says Fein. "She'll just follow the path of every justice in the last 25 years who comes to the bench without a developed philosophy and ends up in the liberal camp. People whose intellect is as thin and dubious as hers will be too intellectually timid to challenge orthodoxy."

The right's long campaign to change the judiciary is at an end, says Fein -- even if Bush has more vacancies to fill during the rest of his presidency. By nominating Miers, Fein says, "he came to the Rubicon and flinched.