There was a story in the NY Times 10 days ago that looked at a study showing that Supreme Court justices
with daughters are more likely to vote in favor of
women's rights than are those without daughters. Even William Rehnquist, in 2003 after his daughter
divorced and became a single mother with a demanding job, became
enough of a feminist to write in one of his rulings against
“stereotypes about women's domestic roles.”
Now the Supremes have ruled 9-0 in
favor of cell phone privacy, despite the eagerness that the
conservative core have shown in other cases to expand the rights of
police and limit the definition of unreasonable searches and seizures. In her column today,
Linda Greenhouse looks at this ruling and wonders why the change in
this particular case. Her suggested answer: because all of the
justices are cell phone users themselves, the issue became personal.
This correlates with a similar 9-0
ruling a couple of years ago that the police could not place a GPS
device on a suspected drug dealer's car. During oral arguments in
that case, in response to a question from the bench, the government
conceded that the justices themselves could be subjected to such an
invasion of privacy. It became personal.
Fourteen years ago, Greenhouse says,
Rehnquist was part of a 7-2 majority ruling that limited the ability
of the police to inspect checked luggage. Again, because the justices
were all travelers themselves, the issue was personal.
The best justices have always kept in
mind that their rulings have concrete effects in the lives of real people, and are more
than just interpretations of the law or applications of abstract ideology.
Apparently even the most ideological of justices recognize this when
they see themselves as part of that mass of real people.
