Annoying guy, going off and dying before I was born so I can’t ask him.

Laws do tend to be more binding on those people who have reason to want to break them than those who don’t. And sometimes laws can be more binding on the poor than the rich. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong. For example, damage to your frontal lobes can both throw you into poverty (through inability to work) and make it vastly more difficult for you to avoid attacking someone. Laws banning assault bind much more on vulnerable people with dangerous head injuries than on the average person – does that mean they’re wrong?

In the cases Anatole cites, while I am rather inclined to believe that people should be allowed to sleep under bridges and so forth if they like (and it may be useful to any rich people who get caught out without shelter), allowing the free stealing of bread would result in there being no more bread to steal as the bakers, farmers, etc, decided to do something more rewarding with their time. Better the law be equal and the government give money to the poor to buy their own bread.

And in the case of immigration laws and regulations – surely the problem there comes from the inequality between those with citizenship and those without?

Right. So you going to cite some case references for this bizarre implication that (a) bread-thieves rarely get away with their crimes because the police put such mammoth efforts into catching them and (b) theft of bread is typically punished with a stiffer sentence that the various types of stock-market fraud?

Kieran,

Your parallel is all wrong. Rich people don’t need to steal bread, because they can afford to buy it. Rich people don’t need to sleep under bridges, because they have houses. White people don’t need to appeal court decisions about schools, because… er….

The Democrats don’t have the presidency, and they don’t have a majority in the Senate. Bush appoints someone about whom the worst that can be said is that they worked for past Republican administrations. Who knows who he will appoint for the other vacancy? The Democrats need to keep their powder dry.

Grow up. Confirmation is going to be near unanimous.

To be completely fair to the law here, it also forbids the poor from insider share dealing, manipulating the stock market, monopolies on certain trade items and owning too large a percentage of the national media.

[Stealing unattributed an excellent riposte.]

this seems to me to get it exactly ass-backwards. roberts is being considered for chief justice of the supreme court. clearly, his opinion of whether the law is good or bad policy is, or should be, irrelevant. but the question of whether he thinks the said law is constitutional is highly relevant, in that this is the question roberts would have to decide if it came before the court.

But, like Tom T. says, this was written as an exercise, marshalling arguments for just one side of a debate. To claim that it represents Roberts’ views is unfair. Also slightly unfair is the use of the phrase “unequal treatment” to describe what Roberts is writing about. “Treatment” isn’t wrong, but conjures something broader than the issues of standing and levels of scrutiny that the memo is considering.

(That said, given that employment in Reagan’s justice department wasn’t mandatory, arguments that Roberts was just doing his job as a lawyer only go so far in quelling doubts about his personal views.)

(Just like the myriad immigration laws and regulations will never get someone in trouble who holds the relevant citizenship.)

I don’t imagine many states have law that explicitly allow sleeping under bridges, even though it may be allowed by default if there’s no law about it.
Oh, and I cut off the end of the original cite: “… de mendier dans les rues et voler du pain.”

I’d have thought he’d be very much opposed to the likes of Anatole France anyway.

(The French original: “La majestueuse égalité des lois interdit aux riches comme aux pauvres de coucher sous les ponts,”

So “majestueux” qualifies “égalité”. Unfortunately, “majestueux” is not precisely the same as “majestic”, nor is “égalité” exactly “equality”. My stab at a translation: “The law in its lofty concern for equality [maybe better: “in its noble even-handedness”] forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.”]

I bet Hillary votes FOR Roberts. And she
even represents the state from which the NYRB
is published.

80+ for Roberts confirmation?