Stephen Breyer

This May 17 attack on Supreme Court nominee Stephen Breyer, your Column Right contributor Cal Thomas laments, “Breyer is clearly part of the Harvard sociological approach, which believes the law is something that should be fitted to the wishes and needs of contemporary culture, not to an absolute fixed standard to which people should be made to conform for their own and the country’s welfare.”

Of course laws can be fitted to the wishes and needs of contemporary culture! If they couldn’t, we’d still have school segregation, male-only voting privileges, Prohibition, slavery . . . and hundreds of other dated rules and institutions. In America, we do not claim that our laws come from on high, that they are divinely inspired “absolutes” to which all citizens must “conform.” As human society evolves, so must its laws.

ALLEN B. URY

Costa Mesa

The first sentence of David Savage’s May 15 news analysis on the nomination of Stephen Breyer preposterously likens Clinton to his “Republican predecessors, who sought to build a court more likely to adhere to the status quo.” Far from championing the then-status quo, Presidents Reagan and Bush self-consciously planned to reshape the federal judiciary including the Supreme Court through their nominating power. In this, they had a substantial measure of success.

Perhaps Bush was less committed to the plan than Reagan because of his indifference to domestic issues. In the case of Robert Bork, the Senate’s determination to take its constitutional responsibilities seriously did slow this plan’s progress; still Bush subsequently nominated Clarence Thomas. Admittedly, sitting justices may thwart presidential plans by virtue of their subsequent judicial evolution. Savage notes all this late in the article. But he significantly misrepresents recent presidential history by describing the goals of Reagan and Bush as the appointment of status quo justices.

ROBERT D. GOLDSTEIN

Professor of Law, UCLA