DADT Judge Lauded as No-Nonsense and Scholarly (NYT)

[mike r]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/us/politics/11judge.html

September 10, 2010
A Judge Lauded as No-Nonsense and Scholarly
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

As a judge in the busy federal courthouse in Riverside, Calif., Virginia A. Phillips has presided over a rich and varied parade of cases through the years.

She overturned the conviction of a man accused of murdering his mother, and awarded damages to a nurse who was fired from a public health clinic for refusing to distribute contraceptives for religious reasons. She has handled trials of Ponzi schemers and civil suits by police officers whose superiors put hidden cameras in their locker room.

Through them all, she has maintained a relatively low profile — until Thursday, that is, when she declared the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law governing gay and bisexual members of the military unconstitutional. “Honestly, I did not expect it to get as much attention as it did,” Judge Phillips said. “During the course of the case, there wasn’t a lot of attention paid to it.”

In her 86-page opinion, she called the law, passed by Congress in 1993, an unconstitutional violation of First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and Fifth Amendment guarantees of substantive due process. Though the law is nearly 17 years old, the challenge has been building for some time, said Casey Pick, a lawyer who serves as a programs officer for Log Cabin Republicans, which brought the suit...


Judge Virginia A. Phillips