Who are the Likely Contenders for High Court?

�� Judge, 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since May 30, 1991. Appointed by President George Bush.

�� Previously served as a judge in U.S. District Court for Western District of Texas; appointed in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan. Earlier, he was a Texas state court judge and lawyer in private practice.

�� J.D., University of Texas School of Law, 1976.

�� Born in San Antonio.

�� From a concurrence in Causeway Medical Suite v. Ieyoub, April 14, 1997: “Some … judicial decisions, such as invalidating statutes that discriminate based on race, reflect our nation’s highest aspirations as an individualist, pluralist society. Nonetheless, judicial officers should not force the pace of change nor bind the nation to wise policy using loose interpretations of our written Constitution. Neither our aspirations about privacy, nor our concerns about the consequences of leaving certain matters for states to decide, invests us with the authority to nullify state law. Article III courts should not cloak political choices with claims that those choices are required by the Due Process Clause… .

“In part because of the Supreme Court’s ambiguity about the scope of substantive due process, it is unclear to me that the Court itself still believes that abortion is a ‘fundamental right’ under the Fourteenth Amendment… . For the purposes of this opinion, it is necessary only to point out that the Court’s more recent decisions indicate tepid support for Roe v. Wade. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court in a fractured joint opinion upheld Roe‘s ‘central holding,’ but did not defend Roe as a sound reading of the Constitution. Instead, it upheld Roe out of concerns for the abstract, nonconstitutional value of stare decisis, for the institutional credibility of the Court, and because of the primacy of settled expectations about constitutional law.”


ALBERTO GONZALES, AGE 45

�� Justice, Texas Supreme Court since Jan. 11, 1999; appointed by Gov. George W. Bush.

�� J.D., Harvard Law School, 1982.

�� Born in San Antonio, Texas.

�� Previously served as Texas secretary of state and general counsel to Bush.

�� Ruling for the Texas Supreme Court in Southwestern Refining Co. v. Bernal, May 11, 2000: “The class action is a procedural device intended to advance judicial economy by trying claims together that lend themselves to collective treatment. It is not meant to alter the parties’ burdens of proof, right to a jury trial, or the substantive prerequisites to recovery under a given tort. Procedural devices may ‘not be construed to enlarge or diminish any substantive rights or obligations of any parties to any civil action.’ … Although a goal of our system is to resolve lawsuits with ‘great expedition and dispatch and at the least expense,’ the supreme objective of the courts is ‘to obtain a just, fair, equitable, and impartial adjudication of the rights of litigants under established principles of substantive law.’ … This means that ‘convenience and economy must yield to a paramount concern for a fair and impartial trial.’ “


POSSIBLE GORE APPOINTEES

JOSE CABRANES, AGE 59