By Laura OlsonThe Daily Northwestern
Despite the efforts of presidents to pick Supreme Court justices who will stand firm, it is to be expected that judges’ opinions on issues will change, according to veteran Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times.
This idea, presented during her speech Friday evening at a League of Women Voters of Evanston event, struck some audience members as slightly ironic.
One audience member asked Greenhouse about what some have called the “Greenhouse Effect,” a theory that some judges base decisions on what they believe will help them to gain favorable press coverage. Although the idea refers not just to Greenhouse’s articles but to the media in general, several audience members and Greenhouse smiled at the connection to her topic.
The Pulitzer Prize winner told the audience of about 250 that while some justices shift opinions in response to changes in popular thought, she doubted that was the main influence on most jurists.
Medill Professor Emerita Mary Ann Weston, a League member who organized the evening, said the group first contacted Greenhouse after several members had read her book nearly two years ago, and that Friday was the first date she was available to speak.
Greenhouse, who has covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times for the past 29 years, began her career at a time when American culture limited the opportunities of female journalists. She covered local and state politics for the newspaper before moving to its Washington bureau.
Greenhouse focused on how justices change during their tenure, primarily talking about former Justice Harry Blackmun, the subject of her 2005 book, “Becoming Justice Blackmun.”
“Justices have an impact on the institution, obviously,” she said. “But the impact of the institution on the individual justice is a bit more elusive, less obvious but not less important.”
Greenhouse explained how Blackmun’s views on social issues evolved during his tenure. In his first opinion, Blackmun was skeptical of a man refusing to pay a fee to file for bankruptcy, saying he couldn’t understand why the man hadn’t paid it through an option of installments.
But four years later, Greenhouse noted, in writing the majority opinion for Roe v. Wade, Blackmun discusses “another world” of which justices have little exposure or understanding, a change she said the controversial case played a role in shaping.
“He was the one who got the hate mail … the death threats, the pickets wherever he went for the rest of his career,” she said. “And on the other side, he was the one who became a hero to women’s groups, in whose cause he was, at most, a reluctant foot soldier.”
As for why some justices change more than others, Greenhouse speculated the lack of an agenda and the jolt of uprooting their lives to move to Washington may have made some justices more open to change than others who came with more specific views and from inside the Beltway.
Looking to the future, Greenhouse said the court’s current gridlock may figure in to the next election.
“It will matter a great deal who is in the White House after 2008,” she said.
Northwestern, one of the event’s sponsors, invited several students and recent alumni to attend. Jon Marino, SESP ’06, said he was interested in learning how the Court changes the justices.
“I wonder if she has thought about looking at other institutions – do universities change their students in a similar way?” Marino said. “These are changes that we don’t really talk about much in the public sphere.”
Evanston resident Kathy Tate-Bradish,a League member, said she thought Greenhouse’s depth of knowledge was phenomenal.
“With a speaker like that, you leave feeling like an insider,” she said.
Reach Laura Olson at [email protected].
