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Study This with Dr. Brian v.1b

By Dr. Brian Russell • on August 19, 2009

By Dr. Brian Russell I don’t like to see people suffer financially, but I actually think that what’s happening in California could be good for that state and for the country. The state is beyond bankrupt, and its citizens are finally having to make some tough choices about what they really want their government to do for them. So far, they don’t want to raise taxes on themselves, so they’re actually having to consider whether to let people out of prisons, lay off state workers, close state parks, cut public assistance benefits, etc. Good, it’s about time, just ass backwards. Governments should make a list of priorities, and when the money runs out, that’s it, nothing else gets funded. If California (and the United States) had done that in the first place, it wouldn’t be in unbearable debt right now.
As both a lawyer and a psychologist, I have to say that Republicans are missing the boat on President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Some are calling her a “racist” because she once said that, as a Latina, she thought she could make a better decision than a Caucasian man. Whether she’s a “racist” or not – and I’d need to hear a lot more racially-charged comments from her before I’d conclude that – misses the point, and the point is this: The job of a Supreme Court justice is to interpret federal law, and that should be a purely intellectual exercise, completely devoid of an emotional component. In fact, given the difficulty experienced by human beings in attempting to detach themselves from their own emotions and from the emotions of others around them, the best Supreme Court justice would be a robot, but we’re nowhere close to developing that kind of intelligence artificially (and the Constitution requires a human being). So, we all should evaluate Supreme Court nominees based on their apparent abilities to divorce reason from emotion and to make decisions that are as purely intellectual as is humanly possible. A nominee’s race and gender and “compelling life story” would be relevant qualifications only if the job required empathy, and in the days since Sotomayor was nominated, supporters of her nomination, from the President on down, have repeatedly noted “empathy” among her eminent qualifications. That’s the problem, the “boat” that Republicans are missing as they get caught up in largely-gratuitous dockside discussion about whether she’s a “racist.” The job does not require empathy. It requires the opposite of empathy – detachment – that decisions be made with regard to the emotions of neither the justice nor the parties involved. Supreme Court justices can express empathy toward litigants during oral arguments before the Court and in explaining decisions that will be profoundly disappointing to the losing litigants (as Justice Samuel Alito indicated during his confirmation hearings), but when it comes to actually making decisions, empathy should play no role whatsoever. Any nominee, therefore, who believes that her race and gender will somehow enhance her ability to make decisions as a Supreme Court justice is sub-optimally qualified for the position, not because she’s a “racist,” but because she fundamentally misunderstands the job. (May 29, 2009)