TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: SENATORS‘ OPENING STATEMENTS AT SUPREME COURT CONFIRMATON HEARINGS
This article examines the opening statements made by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Its aim is to identify the audiences senators target in their opening statements and to examine the messages they send to these audiences. The article shifts the focus away from the outcome of Supreme Court nominations to the “nomination discourse” of confirmation proceedings. Although senators use their opening statements to send a variety of messages to multiple audiences, they tend to emphasize the themes of judicial philosophy, the questioning of nominees, and the Senate's role in the confirmation process.
Bork's Law and The Closing of the Judicial Mind
Both of these books grew out of a singularly fascinating and important legal and political event, the Senate's rejection of Judge Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987. Taken together they shed considerable light on two important issues of constitutional governance: how the Supreme Court should interpret the Constitution; and the proper role of the Senate in fulfilling its constitutional responsibility to advise and consent to Supreme Court nominations. Far more than the speeches and other superficial events which trivialized our constitutional bicentennial, the Bork nomination controversy forced the nation to consider how, in one very important matter, the Constitution actually worked and whether there was cause for alarm or need for reform. Judge Bork, of course, views these events as evidence of two major flaws in the system: the continued heresy of the left-liberal tradition of "political judging" which has "seduced" the law, indeed torn it from its very roots and thus threatened its legitimacy; and a confirmation process that itself has become excessively political and which, at least in his case, pandered shamelessly to public opinion. He sees himself as a martyr to defense of the Supreme Court from neo-Marxist marauders, the victim of a conspiracy of the "intellectual and knowledge class" to maintain its domination of the Court (to say nothing of the law schools, our legal culture, and the law itself). The "political passions of three decades [had converged] on a single empty chair" (at 341). "I was," he writes, "a symbol they needed to destroy" (at 345). For him the war between the classes continues and he, now having resigned his federal judgeship and thus no longer encumbered by the judicial robe, proposes to wage it intensely. This book, an advocate's brief, is presumably just the first salvo. Bork is
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982, A Commentary
Volume VI is the sixth substantive volume to be published in the series. It deals with the work of the First Committee at the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, namely the international seabed area. The volume thus embraces the deep seabed mining regime set out in Part XI of the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea together with the 1994 Agreement on its implementation. Completion of this commentary was delayed first by the consultations and negotiations that commenced in 1990 and led to the 1994 Agreement and the entry into force of the Convention. It was further delayed until the Assembly of the International Seabed Authority approved the detailed mining regulations in 2000. Additional supplementary material can be found at UNCLOS 1982 Commentary: Supplementary Documents.