Susan Jacoby on Anti-Judicial Extremism

I remember that the Athenians, round the time of the Pelopponesian war, had a nasty habit of executing or exiling their generals in a fit of collective pique, and only later thinking "oh shit, we didn't want to do that".

When I read this, I was extremely glad that our modern judicial systems are relatively immune to this lynch-mob approach. These people who think that judges should do whatever the screaming masses say obviously haven't studied much history...

Remember Bork's Inkblot?

Dissolving the Inkblot: Privacy as Property Right
Cato Policy Report, January/February 1993
...To the liberal claim that laws against contraception and abortion fall to the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Judge Robert Bork responds that due process refers only to procedures and that "substantive due process" is a contradiction in terms. Finally, Bork finds no case for privacy in the Ninth Amendment, which he says is as obscure as it would be had an inkblot covered it on the original parchment.
...Bork's real objection is to any holistic reading of the Constitution. Instead, he favors what John Hart Ely called a "clause-bound interpretation." The idea is to read each guarantee in the Bill of Rights as if no others existed, taking care not to acquire any cumulative sense of what the Framers had in mind. That is a dubious theory of interpretation, but in at least one case Bork is not "clause-bound" enough: he prefers to read the Constitution as if the Ninth Amendment wer not there.
...Thus, both the liberals and the conservatives misunderstand privacy. The conservatives engage in a narrow and unnatural reading of the Constitution in order to avoid seeing what they do not wish to see, while the liberals find in the Constitution not penumbras but a Rorschach test that reveals only what they wish to see. In both cases it comes down to an inkblot. Both approaches allow their adherents to disparage most freedoms and exalt the few freedoms allowed by their respective moral and political philosophies.

And of course this is also why electing judges is a bad idea. I fail to understand why someone thinks it is a good idea to have someone sitting on the bench who might have to rule on a case involving someone who donated money to the judge's campaign.