Washington, D.C. appellate lawyer and SCOTUSblog founder Tom Goldstein weighed in today on yesterday’s news that the Justice Department would not ask the full 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the 2010 federal health care overhaul:

Seeking en banc review in the Eleventh Circuit would have made sense only if the government was going to press the Supreme Court to defer reviewing the constitutional question until next Term (including by denying review of the pending Sixth Circuit case).  So, the United States would have been making a choice to delay a final answer – because Supreme Court review is inevitable – for a year.  I expect that the agencies involved strongly resisted that delay, and the Solicitor General decided that the upside of potentially getting the panel opinion reversed was not actually that great, because any victory could itself be temporary.

The 11^th Circuit divided 2-1 last month in declaring unconstitutional the part of the statute that requires many Americans to secure health insurance, with Chief Judge Joel F. Dubina and Judge Frank M. Hull co-writing the majority opinion and Judge Stanley Marcus dissenting. The deadline to seek en banc review of that decision was yesterday.

The constitutionality of the 2010 law has divided the nation’s appellate judges, and Goldstein’s SCOTUSblog colleague Lyle Denniston analyzes here how the 11^th Circuit case fits into the bigger picture.

The recently released Jacqueline Kennedy oral history interviews reveal she found Justice Arthur Goldberg insufferable and had some of the same frustration with the court’s “isolation” that the court’s critics might express today.

Goldberg, who rose to prominence as a union lawyer, first served as Kennedy’s secretary of labor and the president named him to the U.S. Supreme Court when Felix Frankfurter stepped down.

Jackie told interviewer Arthur M.  Schlesinger Jr.  that Goldberg “never stopped talking about himself.” She called him “the biggest egomaniac of any man I’ve ever seen in my life.”

She said of Goldberg in another part of the interview, “I just think it’s such a shame to be so pleased with yourself.”

Her husband’s treatment by the Dallas Morning News, which ran a full-page ad the day of the assassination saying Kennedy was soft on communism, was still an open wound for Jackie, and she tied that into her feelings about Goldberg. Jackie recalled that Goldberg voted with the court in a case “where you can write anything about people in public office.”

She continued elsewhere in the interview, “And I thought, that’s right after that ad of the day in Dallas—‘Wanted for Treason.’ And there you, his appointee, go and say that everything, even this, is all right? But it’s because the Supreme Court is so isolated. They’re never affected by newspapers, anything.”

She added, “When you think, ads like that in the paper was partly what killed Jack. They get so detached from life up in the Supreme Court.”

She was referring to New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 case where a unanimous court established the “actual malice” standard in defamation cases involving public figures.

In addition to the ad in the Dallas Morning News the day of the assassination, a “Wanted for Treason” leaflet with the president’s picture was distributed in Dallas that day.

Schlesinger also asked Jackie about Justice William O. Douglas, whom he suggested was a “great friend” of the president. Jackie corrected him, allowing that Douglas was a friend of the president’s father and his brother, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “We never really saw Bill Douglas much, but I think he liked him.”

Unwilling to let go of the line of questioning, Schlesinger asked if Douglas came around the White House. “Never ,” Jackie replied, adding that “none of those people,” came to the White House, presumably referring to the other justices.

As has been reported, Jackie called Martin Luther King a “phony,” and “a tricky person” because of his dalliances outside his marriage.

The remarks should be viewed in the context of what Jackie had been told about King. Not long before the interview,  Jackie was told that King made jokes about the president’s funeral while he was watching it on TV and ridiculed Cardinal Richard Cushing, the archbishop of Boston who married the Kennedys and celebrated his funeral mass.  That information came from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had a well-known vendetta against King. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, an aide to King, told Fox 5 last week that King admired the president and that Hoover fabricated the information. A footnote in the book refers to an FBI tape of King’s purported remarks.

Jackie and Robert Kennedy later attended King’s funeral in Atlanta and Jackie also said in the interview  that her husband “never really said anything against Martin Luther King.” The president “said what an incredible speaker he was during that freedom march thing,” and didn’t pass judgment on the reports he was receiving from Hoover on King’s personal life.

Caroline Kennedy,  who gave  permission for her mother’s interviews to be  released,  cautions in the forward to the book that her mother gave the interviews—one of only three times she spoke to a journalist about her White House years—when she “was a young widow in the extreme stages of grief. The interviews were conducted just four months after she had lost her husband, her home, and her sense of purpose. She had two young children to raise alone. It isn’t surprising that there are some statements she would later have considered too personal, and others too harsh.”

Though she was often the subject of press reports and gossip rags, Jackie, who died in 1994, guarded her privacy and never wrote a memoir.  She gave these interviews in 1964 on the condition that they be locked in a vault during her lifetime. The book, “Jacqueline Kennedy, Historic conversations on life with John F. Kennedy,” is accompanied by CDs of the entire interview with Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide and one-time Harvard history professor. Schlesinger, who died in 2007, won the Pulitzer Prize for his history of the Kennedy presidency, “A Thousand Days.”

…that the U.S. Constitution was signed.  Who were the two Georgians to affix their signatures to this document?

Update:

They were Abraham Baldwin and William Few.  See here.

Musician-environmentalist Chuck Leavell declared himself to be on the side of Gibson Guitar Corp. in its run-in with the federal government over the alleged use of illegally imported wood in its instruments.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” he told an audience at the Atlanta Press Club Thursday evening at the 191 Club. “If that’s the law it ought to be changed.”

The Rolling Stones keyboard player added that his first guitar—purchased in 1964 or 1965—was a Gibson.

Agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raided Gibson facilities in Nashville and Memphis on Aug. 24 and seized computer hard drives, guitars and pallets of wood, according to the Nashville Tennessean. The seizures were made under the Lacey Act, a 1900 law that originally banned the importation of certain feathers and was amended in 2008 to protect environmentally threatened plants and animals. Gibson also was raided by federal agents in 2009. The company has denied any wrongdoing.

A Wall Street Journal article on the raids said some musicians fear going through customs because the law allows the government to seize any instrument that contains even a small amount of suspected illegal wood. Owners of instruments that were made before the importation of the woods was made illegal in 2008 can be required to provide documentation of when they made their purchase or when the instrument was manufactured. 

U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Nashville, told the Tennessean that he plans to introduce legislation to amend the Lacey Act that would grandfather in musical instruments made before 2008 to address musicians’ concerns about being able to travel with their instruments.

Leavell and former Atlanta advertising executive Joel Babbitt were at the Press Club to talk about Mother Nature Network (mnn.com), an environmental news site they co-founded. Leavell also signed copies of his new book, “Growing a Better America,” in which he discusses how economic growth can be compatible with protecting the environment.

As for traveling, Leavell said he’s not worried about federal agents seizing the band’s instruments. “Hopefully, this kind of silliness will stop,” he said.

Chief Justice Carol Hunstein is handing over the reins to Presiding Justice George Carley…briefly. Click here to see what’s happening.

As the DeKalb County legal community remembers Judge Anne Workman, who died last week, veteran freelance reporter Ben Smith came upon a speech she gave in 2008 that gives a sense of what she was like.  Ben’s obituary of Judge Workman appears in Thursday’s Daily Report, which will be online later this afternoon.  (The story will be free on our web site.)

Here is the text of the speech:

A  Curmudgeon’s  View  from  the  Last  Century  Forward

By Chief Judge Anne Workman, Dekalb Superior Court

(Keynote Speaker for the DeKalb Bar Association Bench and Bar Dinner March 2008)

         When I was approached by Noah [Pines] and Mike [Hawkins] to speak tonight, I was told in no uncertain terms that this speaking opportunity was only being offered under the strict condition that the speech not last more than twenty minutes.  I tell you this to allay any fears or flashbacks that you may harbor about being kept here into the night.  I was somewhat surprised to be asked to speak as a reason to select me did not immediately come to mind and the topic was to be how the bar in DeKalb has evolved in the thirty five years that I have been a member.

           Upon reflection,  I realized that I must be  the oldest living woman  member of the DeKalb Bar. When I joined this organization in 1973, there were two women lawyers who were members -  Sara Frances McDonald and Margaret Farleigh  – both of whom  have  since passed away.  There are those here tonight who have been members of this bar longer than I, but they are all men.  The most striking evolution of this bar to which I have been witness is the sea change relative to the presence of and participation by women attorneys in the courtrooms and on the benches in our courthouse.  It is this transformation that is the most personal and directly known to me, because along with other women from those times, I have lived it.  And because I have lived it, I can speak to that journey. Read more »

This morning, U.S. Marshals put on sale — via an online auction  based in downtown Atlanta —  the personal effects of convicted bomber Theodore J. “Ted” Kaczynski, the man known as the infamous “Unabomber.”

Atlanta has no connection to the Unabomber or his crimes. U.S. Marshal spokeswoman Lynzey Donahue said the U.S. General Services Administration chose Atlanta as the auction site — where about 50 of Kaczynski’s personal items to be sold on line were on display Tuesday morning. Read more »

A writer for The Washington Post has written a new national anthem, arguing that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is too hard to sing and that the Bill of Rights better describes the country’s greatness.

He put it to the music of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” better known as the music to “The Lone Ranger.” Read more »

As part of the University of Georgia’s commemoration of its desegregation 50 years ago, the School of Law’s Davenport-Benham Black Law Students Association will re-enact the 1961 courtroom battle that acknowledged the rights of African-American students Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes to attend classes.

A panel discussion featuring Georgia Supreme Court Justice Robert Benham, U.S. District Court Judge Horace T. Ward and local attorney Kenneth I. Dious will follow the re-enactment. Read more »

One hundred and twenty years. Fifty pages of coverage.  An interactive online timeline that promises to suck in legal types and history buffs like nothing you’ve seen.

Welcome to the Daily Report’s 120 Year Anniversary package, publishing Monday, Dec. 20, but available online now.  It’s a sampling —just enough to whet your appetite —of the most important decisions, intriguing cases and dynamic personalities borne of Georgia’s legal community since —well, since before Benjamin Harrison was in office.

We’ll be adding to our digital package over the coming months and we ask for your feedback: tell us what you think, and what we might have missed, as we look forward to covering Georgia’s legal community for many years to come.

Visit the History of Law in Atlanta »