News & Announcements
Christopher Eisgruber to address freshman assembly
July 16, 2009
On Sunday, September 13, Christopher Eisgruber, Provost and Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values, will address the Class of 2013 for the annual freshman assembly on the subject of "How to Pick a Supreme Court Justice."
Professor Eisgruber asks that in preparation for the assembly you read a congressional report on the role of the Senate in the nomination and confirmation process of a Supreme Court Justice.
Professor Eisgruber offers the following introduction to his lecture: "After President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor for a seat on the Supreme Court, reporters scoured her writings for clues about what a kind of justice she would be—they even looked at her senior thesis and letters that she wrote to the Prince during her undergraduate days at Princeton in the 1970s! It was all part of the political drama that now accompanies every Supreme Court appointment. People have called the modern confirmation process a kabuki dance, a subtle minuet, or, less elegantly, a mess. Yet, despite the obvious excess and partisanship, the confirmation process is also a serious, high-stakes public argument about the Constitution. It raises, implicitly or explicitly, difficult and important questions not only about the American political system, but about constitutional government more generally. What should elected officials look for when they choose judges for a constitutional court, like the United States Supreme Court? Should they restrict themselves to looking for the person with the best legal skills? Or is it reasonable for them to consider other factors, including a nominee’s values and experience—or her capacity for empathy, as President Obama suggested? Presumably the point of the process is to choose somebody who will interpret the Constitution well—and that observation raises another, even more profound set of questions: how does one interpret constitutions, and what does it mean to interpret a constitution well? All of these questions are in the domain of constitutional theory, and they will be the subject of my lecture in September. The reading for the lecture provides some historical background on the American confirmation process (which, unlike in most other countries, is the same for Supreme Court justices as it is for other federal judges and many executive branch officials). I hope that the rest of your summer goes well, and I look forward to discussing the Constitution with you in September."