Supreme Court Clerks spill Bush v. Gore details

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“Since ‘The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court’ (the 1979 Supreme Court expose by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong), I don’t think there has been another case where law clerks spoke so openly to the press about the inner workings of the court,” says Noah Feldman, a professor of law at New York University and ex-clerk for Justice David H. Souter. “I’m shocked.”

The justices have had no public reaction. Chief Justice William Rehnquist declined a request to comment for this article.

The Vanity Fair sources do not deny the importance of in-chambers confidentiality, a lifetime obligation spelled out in the written code of conduct that all law clerks pledge to uphold when they come to the court. They simply felt bound by a higher duty.

“We feel that something illegitimate was done with the Court’s power, and such an extraordinary situation justifies breaking an obligation we’d otherwise honor,” one clerk told the magazine. “Our secrecy was helping to shield some of those actions.”

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journal...on/9949251.htm

Most of the criticism in the Vanity Fair piece is aimed at Justices Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, all of whom voted in favor of Bush. Scalia is depicted bullying Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg into watering down her dissenting opinion. O’Connor is described as emotionally fixated on stopping a recount and Kennedy as overly influenced by his right-wing clerks.

As the Vanity Fair article’s authors concede, the clerks present no document or other “smoking gun” proving that the conservative justices deliberately decided the case to suit their partisan preferences – a charge that members of the court on both sides have denied publicly.