Magazine October 2009 | ABA Journal

October 2009

No More Kabuki Confirmations

Photo by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty images

It’s a “Kabuki dance,” said Joe Biden when he was a senator on the Judiciary Committee. U.S. Supreme Court nominees give the illusion of responding to senators’ questions, but say little of importance.

It’s “as if the public doesn’t have a right to know what you think about fundamental issues facing them,” he told John G. Roberts Jr. at his 2005 confirmation hearing for chief justice.

Biden’s successor, Sen. Ted Kaufman, told the National Law Journal that the process resembled the Super Bowl—with press coverage all around.

It’s “a subtle minuet,” said Sen. Arlen Specter during the hearing for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., “with the nominee answering as many questions as he thinks are necessary in order to be confirmed.”

For his part, Justice Felix Frankfurter, plagued during his confirmation hearing with suggestions that he was partial to communists, favored the athletic comparison. “I thought that it would just be a little room where we would sit around,” he said of the Judiciary Committee hearing. “I found that this was Madison Square Garden.”

In This Issue

Feature Section

Legal Rebels

Our September cover story featured the first seven Legal Rebels—some of the profession’s leading innovators. This month we showcase three more.
70 Sizzling Apps

Apps: It’s a little word for those mini-programs that can pay off big in productivity, knowledge or just plain fun. And they come at all price points, from expensive-but-worth-it to absolutely free.
True Lies

I am a terrorist. At least that’s what I’ve been told to be, as I’m sitting at a computer in the lab adjacent to J. Peter Rosenfeld’s cluttered second-floor office in the psychology department on Northwestern University’s leafy campus.