{"id":53096,"date":"2016-09-30T11:27:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T16:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.findlaw-admin.com\/ability-legal\/supreme\/legal-commentary\/some-practical-advice-to-senators-preparing-for-judge-alitos-confirmation-hearings.html"},"modified":"2016-09-30T11:27:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T16:27:00","slug":"some-practical-advice-to-senators-preparing-for-judge-alitos-confirmation-hearings","status":"publish","type":"supreme","link":"https:\/\/supreme.findlaw.com\/legal-commentary\/some-practical-advice-to-senators-preparing-for-judge-alitos-confirmation-hearings.html","title":{"rendered":"Some Practical Advice to Senators Preparing For Judge Alito’s Confirmation Hearings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Some Practical Advice to Senators Preparing For Judge Alito’s Confirmation Hearings <\/h1><\/td>\n <\/tr>\n

By VIKRAM DAVID AMAR<\/h2><\/a><\/td>\n <\/tr>\n

Friday, Jan. 06, 2006<\/td>\n\n <\/tr>\n <\/table>\n

On Monday, Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito are set to begin. In today’s column, I offer five modest and practical pieces of advice for the Senators who will question Alito. <\/p>

The advice applies to all interrogating Senators, on both sides of the aisle, who want to use the hearings to really learn something about the nominee, and teach something to the American people. But I should acknowledge up front that my suggestions may be especially relevant to Alito skeptics. <\/p> \n\n\n

#1. Pick Your Spots, Rather than Trying to Cover The Entire Field of Constitutional Law<\/b><\/p>

<\/b>Even with a prolonged hearing, Senators could not come close to examining every important area of constitutional law. Major law school constitutional law textbooks today are literally hefty (often weighing over seven pounds) and lengthy (averaging over 1500 pages — the one I co-author has almost 1900). Discussing all the material in any one of them, even in a cursory manner, would take three full semesters, rather than three weeks. <\/p>

Moreover, even these constitutional casebooks are limited in certain ways. They barely even touch on the so-called “criminal procedure” aspects of the Constitution – for example, the guarantees of the Fourth and Sixth Amendments, and the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against compelled self-incrimination and freedom from double jeopardy. Yet these guarantees and privileges make up a good part of the Supreme Court’s docket. <\/p>

And that docket, of course, is not confined to constitutional interpretation: Important and vexing statutory interpretation questions invariably arise in the high Court, demanding that the Court give meaning to seminal Congressional statutes, such as various civil rights acts and environmental laws.<\/p>

For these reasons, Senators must invariably pick just a few areas of law to explore with the nominee, in the hopes that this (hopefully well-chosen) sampling will give a general sense of the nominee’s approach to Supreme Court judging. <\/p>

Which areas should be included in the sampling? If I were to identify a half dozen in the constitutional law arena, they might include: <\/p>

(1) Equality rights<\/u>. I’d focus on the government’s ability or inability to use race to remedy past inequality. I’d also take a look at the so-called reapportionment cases involving the one-person, one-vote principle – cases as to which Judge Alito once voiced disapproval, a stance to which he may or may not currently adhere. <\/p> Column continues below \u2193<\/a>\n\n