InstaPundit has excerpts from some news articles on this. I think an apology was indeed warranted (see here and here).
But as I told the New York Sun reporter who first broke the story, I think this is all that can be done and all that needs to be done here. It would surely have been much better if Judge Calabresi hadn’t made his statements; but now that they have been made, an apology is the only sensible remedy.
Some people say that he should recuse himself from various cases involving the Bush Administration, but I doubt that this is really called for: The statements didn’t tell us more than we already know about many judges, which is that they really don’t like George W. Bush — if we recused all judges who had strong political sentiments from all politically charged cases, we wouldn’t have a lot of judges left. Nor do I think that the comments were egregious enough to warrant some more formal reprimand from the court. The apology was thus both the right thing to do, and the tactically smart thing to do. You can accomplish a lot with a prompt apology.
Incidentally, if anyone has a pointer to a copy of the letter of apology, I’d love to post it; I doubt it has anything much more enlightening than what the newspapers say, but I think it’s generally good to have the original documents as well as the media-filtered versions.
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