Tag Archives: Venn Diagram

Scott Brown’s Model Justices: A Venn Diagram

In Monday night’s Massachusetts Senatorial debate, Scott Brown noted that his favorite Supreme Court justices are Scalia, Kennedy, Sotomayor and Roberts, which is a little bit like saying that your favorite foods are spam, foie gras, twinkies and vegan butter. While Brown might have been able to pick two out of the above four without raising too many eyebrows, the more names he added to that list, the more it looked like he was randomly grasping at any Justices he could remember. (Especially with Sotomayor and Scalia; for God’s sake, doesn’t Brown know that they are both YANKEES fans??) But what if, despite Elizabeth Warren’s guffaws and obvious glee–which even a facepalm could not hide–Brown actually knows more about The Nine than we’re giving him credit for? The First Casualty has come up with a Venn Diagram to see if we could make any possible sense out of Brown’s answer (click to enlarge):

 

Bottom line: Brown’s answer would have been way more credible had he stuck with any combination of Scalia // Kennedy // Roberts. As it is, barring some further explanation that we’ve all missed, his four-way answer makes little sense unless he highly prioritizes Catholicism in a Justice. Either that, or he’s a huge fan of the United States v. Jones majority opinion from last term (where the Court held that the Government’s attaching of a GPS device to a car constitutes a search requiring a warrant), which all four model justices joined.

Victoria Kwan holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School in New York and has just completed a clerkship with a judge in Anchorage, Alaska. She tweets as @nerdmeetsboy and will continue to post periodically here on legal issues. Rumor has it she and Jay Pinho are dating.