Saving Mother Earth

I support the bar’s efforts to encourage lawyers to be environmentally responsible. As a sole practitioner I cannot control many matters, but I do buy 100 percent recycled paper and I plant trees to help offset the carbon footprint of my office and personal activities. These are not major expenditures but they are a start and every law firm or practitioner can do something.

I tell my clients about these actions in my annual newsletter and they sometimes mention this, favorably, in subsequent conversations. Clients care and we ought to care, too.

Brian J. Sheppard
Encino

Eco-harassment

I read with concern that the State Bar was considering establishing a “Lawyers Eco Pledge” (August). I am adamantly opposed.

Most attorneys are intelligent, reasonable persons who will consider the ecological consequences of their actions and govern their conduct accordingly. They do not need Big Brother standing over them asking them to make a pledge that they will function in a manner which the bar considers to be ecologically correct.

We are consistently told that the State Bar is overworked and underfunded, and that because of this it cannot provide real service and assistance to its members. Perhaps if it forgot about stupid ideas like the “Lawyers Eco Pledge,” it could provide real services to its members instead of harassing them.

Gordon R. Lindeen
Simi Valley

Leaning toward precedent

Looking at the Supreme Court decisions Erwin Chemerinsky highlights to make his point (August), I find myself having to come to a completely different conclusion. Dean Chemerinsky appears to be looking for a liberal/conservative orientation from the court, whether it is there or not, and makes it sound like Justice Kennedy flip-flops between liberal and conservative positions. 

I see Justice Kennedy distinguishing between respect for history and precedent and judicial social engineering. In each of the cases he highlights, it would appear Justice Kennedy takes the side of history and precedent against whichever block seeks to implement judicial social engineering. Columbia v. Heller was a case deciding the scope of the Second Amendment in a federal context. Justice Scalia looked at the historical views of gun ownership and Justice Kennedy sided with what Dean Chemerinsky would label the “conservative block.”

On the other hand, in Boumediene v. Bush, Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion holding that the historical and precedential view of habeas corpus is that it is not to be suspended under the circumstances, clearly a decision based on history and precedent, not along ideological lines. It does, however, escape me how whether to apply habeas corpus falls along any ideological lines that can necessarily be called “liberal” or “conservative.” Certainly the strict rule of law has tended in the past to be viewed by many as a “conservative” position so the Boumediene case would appear to be a conservative decision, if anything.

Looking at the remainder of the cases Dean Chemerinsky highlights in his ideological editorial reveal the same pattern. Justice Kennedy appears to take a consistent position that, regardless of the ideology of the matter, whether considered “liberal” or “conservative” by some, if history and precedent seem to bend in a particular direction, that is the direction he will lean. I applaud Justice Kennedy for his ability to take this path.

Donald S. Roberts
Orange