NYT: After Many Firsts, Judge Has Talent for Persuasion (Sears)

[usregimechange]

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears of the Georgia Supreme Court is a contender for a seat on the United States Supreme Court.


ATLANTA — Many things about Leah Ward Sears impressed Andrew Young, the civil rights leader who, as mayor of Atlanta, appointed her to her first judicial post at age 27. Not least was the fact that she had been the first black cheerleader at Savannah High School...

Yet within a few years of Chief Justice Sears’s appointment, the court had moved noticeably away from the right, a change that became evident when it overturned the state antisodomy law in 1998. As chief justice, she developed a reputation for persuasion, often winning narrow victories on a court where she is viewed as part of the liberal minority even though she has always called herself a moderate with a strict military upbringing. When she voted to end the use of the electric chair for executions in Georgia, she disputed arguments that the attack on the method was a challenge to the death penalty itself.

Her concurring opinion in the sodomy case enraged the religious right but struck the libertarian overtones that scholars say have defined her tenure. “To allow the moral indignation of a majority (or, even worse, a loud and/or radical minority) to justify criminalizing private consensual conduct,” she wrote, “would be a strike against freedoms paid for and preserved by our forefathers.”

Chief Justice Sears has addressed same-sex marriage only indirectly, writing in an opinion that alimony should not be reduced for someone who entered into a homosexual relationship the same way it might be if the person had remarried, because such relationships did not enjoy the same legal protections as marriage. She has not discussed her views on abortion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/us/politics/23sears.html

[Lorax7844]

1. sounds good to me