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On the judiciary, Specter’s heart beats liberal

This weekend, I attended a conference at the Yale Law School entitled “The Constitution in 2020,” which brought together a diverse group of progressive academics, practitioners and students from around the country to discuss our vision for what the Constitution will look like at the end of the next decade.

As I munched on some appetizers in the alumni room, I admired the many paintings of the walls of famous Yale alumni that included presidents, judges, famous academics, and other great American legal figures. Amidst this collection of luminaries is a striking portrait of another famous Yale Law alum—Arlen Specter. Specter hails from a school with a venerable liberal tradition, and seeing his picture up on the wall instigated me to dig deeper into his judicial philosophy.

What I found is that, his cross examination of Anita Hill notwithstanding, Specter has generally been on the liberal side of the court, wanting to increase access, limit executive overreaching and eschew an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation. As evidence, I dug up a little noticed bill Specter introduced into the Senate in July of this year. The Notice Pleading Restoration Act of 2009 is a bill specifically designed to overturn a Supreme Court decision; specifically, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, a controversial decision from last term that revolutionized the pleading standard for federal claims that has made it immensely more difficult for plaintiffs to get past summary judgment and initiate discovery in cases where an injury has occurred but evidence is meager. This ruling should bother liberals who care about civil rights violations, because often times a plaintiff will not be able to provide the necessary evidence of official wrongdoing without the tools that discovery gives him to subpoena, interrogate and depose witnesses, collect documents, among other powers.

The fact the Specter introduced this bill himself is a testament to how near and dear these issues are to his heart—and should give Democrats some hope that his new Democratic stripes are as sticky as we’d like them to be.

October 6, 2009 at 12:05 pm

--Adam Schwartzbaum

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