More on Janice Rogers Brown

Kieran Healy gives a good close reading to another Janice Rogers Brown speech, this one delivered to the Federalist Society at around the same time as the speech I cited last night.

A couple of disjointed further comments, or points to emphasize:

First, I'm struck again that both these speeches are explicit statements about the nominee's approach to her work as a judge, and the reasons she came to the view that a judge should not be afraid to overturn laws that he or she believes violate not the Constitution, but a separate "natural rights" view of economic rights. These speeches are recent and specific, significantly more relevant to her position as a judge than was Judge Robert Bork's 1971 Indiana Law Journal article that sank his nomination 16 years later.

Second, this is another case where the right is hiding behind the cloak of religion, and yet this judge appears, on the basis of these two speeches, to be about as secular as one would expect of someone who cites Ayn Rand and Chris Rock as her legal authorities. While she speaks of "natural law" and "natural rights," and attacks the Enlightenment, there is startlingly none of the traditional conservatism that one associates with that line of argument in, say, Alisdair MacIntyre, who see (roughly) the Enlightenment as the birth of rights-based liberalism and call for a return to the moral certainties of Aquinas and earlier. Natural law, to Brown, means absolute property rights and nothing else!

Third, if my old friend Steve Calabresi really believes that African-Americans are going to embrace this cold-blooded fringe philosophy simply because it is delivered by someone who is African-American and who quotes Chris Rock, I have to say, that's as nasty a bit of racial condescension as I've heard in a long time. I look forward to finding out.

The more I read about this nominee, the more I say, please, please, let's stop talking about the Nuclear Option and start talking about this judge!