Jeffrey Toobin Looking for Corrections:
Jeffrey Toobin writes:
Hi Eugene,
I've been reading your posts on The Nine with interest. I am serious about correcting errors in my books, and I intend to fix anything I can. (Differences of opinion and interpretation are another story, of course.) In any event, I'd continue to welcome your thoughts or those of your colleagues. You can also post this email if you like.
Best, Jeff
I much appreciate the sentiment, and want to urge readers to pass along, in the comments to this post, any other errors they might have found. Please limit this to items that you think are genuine errors that require correction, and of course please be polite and substantive.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Jeffrey Toobin Looking for Corrections:
- More on Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine and Justice Thomas:
- My Take on -- And My Frustration With -- Jeffrey Toobin's "The Nine":
- More Criticism of Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine
- Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine and Justice Thomas:
- Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court:
Jeff - I think it would be a worthwhile correction to not include disparaging quotes about individual justices, based on their unanimous written decisions. If there is ever a time that the "Court" does something, it's a unanimous decision. Any negative commentary --- about the decision, not the reasoning --- should tend to attack the Court, not the individual author.
(Obviously, there are exceptions to this, but page 102 seems egregious.)
How is that not an insinuation that Thomas was responsible for the suffering of railroad workers in general, and Hiles in particular. This was a unanimous decision. Thomas' opinion had nothing to do the suffering. The Court's decision did.
Otherwise, we'd be forced to say that Chief Justice Burger's opinion was responsible for making Nixon turn over the tapes. But no reasonable scholar says that. Right?
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Clinton and Cuomo had a complicated relationship. Clinton admired The New Yorker's way with words but found his indecisiveness maddening.
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Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker (and a non-italicized New Yorker, like Cuomo).
Has any of the bloggers here thought about reviewing Keith E. Whittington's book, Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy? If not, what is the criteria for writing about a book? A focus on the Supreme Court? A justice?
Just wondering.
Your point applies with equal force to 5-4 majority opinions as to 9-0 opinions. The only time it's truly correct to insinuate that a single justice's opinion is responsible for any practical consequences is when it's a controlling concurrence, but there is nothing inaccurate about Toobin's decision to note that Thomas wrote the opinion he describes. Rather, you're making a pedantic point of stylistic disagreement, not a correction.
If someone other than Justice Thomas had written the opinion, that would be a correction.
I hope nobody's writing about Chief Justice Burger's opinion in Brown. They should stick with Chief Justice Warren's opinion instead.
Not really. It would be a factual correction about who wrote it, but under your theory --- they all signed on --- we could just as easily say that Justice Ginsburg's opinion/decision hurt railroad workers.
The point is that Toobin is using a 9-0 decision as if it were Thomas' dicta, in an effort to make Thomas look bad. Sure, that's not a "correction" that a copyeditor would pick up, but it's one that honest scholars should not be making.
Scalia did not join Bowers because he was not on the Court. It was one of the last opinions in Chief Justice Burger's final term if I am not mistaken; Scalia was still on the DC Circuit at the conclusion of the October 1986 term and could not have joined Bowers.
Mr. Toobin can thank me later, but I would love a signed copy of his book!
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
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