Attacks on the Judge

Attacks on Judge Anna Diggs Taylor started immediately. For those who want to respond to these vicious attacks on the judges experience, character, and expertise, here is a link to her bio on the Eastern District's web site:

Prior to her appointment to the Federal Court in 1979, Judge Taylor was a private practitioner, a legislative assistant, an Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor, an Assistant United States Attorney, an Adjunct Professor of Law at Wayne State Law School, and an Assistant Corporation Counselor, City of Detroit. She is a 1950 Graduate of the Northfield School for Girls, East Northfield, Massachusetts, and received her B.A. from Barnard College in 1954 and L.L.B. from Yale Law School in 1957. Judge Taylor was appointed to the bench on November 2, 1979.

She is a Trustee of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan and the Henry Ford Health System.

She is a member of the State Bar (Committees on Character and Fitness and on U.S. Courts), Federal Bar, Wolverine Bar, Black Judges Association and Women Judges Association.

                                     

Graduating from Yale Law is impressive for anyone. Graduating from Yale Law as a black woman in 1957 is amazing.

There are more specifics on her experience and awards the Sixth Circuit's web site.

Here is a story about the Judge in the Chicago Tribune:

Thursday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was hardly the first time in more than four decades as a lawyer, prosecutor and federal judge that the civic-minded woman has stood up to powerful authorities, colleagues and lawyers said.

In 1964 she spent a summer in Mississippi as part of the National Lawyers Guild's civil rights program and was in Philadelphia, Miss., when three civil rights activists turned up missing. She and others faced down an angry crowd outside a sheriff's office.

"Judges are shaped by their life experience and world outlook. She grew up in the civil rights movement," said U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn.

Taylor, the first African-American woman to serve as a federal judge in Michigan, handled issues such as Eminem's lawsuit against Apple Computer and MTV over the use of a song, banned Nativity scenes on city property in Birmingham and Dearborn, Mich., and ordered former automaker John DeLorean to pay back millions of dollars.

Former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer said the 73-year-old Taylor "is a brilliant jurist guided by the facts and the law." A Washington native, she came to Detroit when she married U.S. Rep. Charles Diggs, a legendary Detroit Democrat, in 1960. Since divorced, she is now married to S. Martin Taylor, a University of Michigan regent and retired executive vice president of DTE Energy Co.

The right wing blogs and some in the press began the attacks almost immediately.

Bryan Cunningham, in a post at Nation Review Online called "Amateur Hour" says this:

But we cannot accept the stunningly amateurish piece of, I hesitate even to call it legal work, by which she purports to make our government go deaf and dumb to those would murder us en masse. Her bosses on the Court of Appeals and/or the United States Supreme Court will not accept it.

Considering the precedents set in the Hamdi and Hamdan opinions, this seems to be wishful thinking.

This is one of the more civil post found amongst the right wing blogs.

Those who value liberty above fear have a few thoughts as well. Greenwald has more to say here . Lambert at CorrenteWire has a great (but cautious) review here .

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.""

-- Abraham Lincoln

"Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.""

-- General Douglas MacArthur