Yikes!

Senate OKs Controversial Bush Appeals Court Nominee Shedd

From Independent Judiciary (.com):

• Judge Shedd has published approximately sixty opinions in his twelve years on the federal bench. It is estimated that he has hundreds and possibly thousands of unpublished opinions and dispositive rulings. The Senate Judiciary Committee has asked Judge Shedd for those, but some of his most controversial decisions, discussed below, that were reported in newspapers have not been turned over.
  
  
• Judge Shedd authored the original district court decision in Condon v. Reno, striking down the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, based on his belief that the federal government did not have the power to force states to guarantee the privacy of state drivers license information. 6 The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act was passed, in part, because anti-abortion extremists had used accessible driver’s license information to obtain the addresses of employees and patients of clinics that performed abortions and then posted those addresses on the Internet. Although the Fourth Circuit affirmed Judge Shedd’s decision, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the holding in an opinion written by Chief Justice Rehnquist.
  
  
• In another particularly troubling case, Judge Shedd made several insensitive comments as he dismissed a lawsuit aimed at removing the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse’s dome. According to press accounts, Judge Shedd suggested that South Carolinians “don’t care if that flag flies or not.” He also questioned the plaintiff’s assertion that the flag was controversial, asserting that “controversial is what anyone defines as controversial,” and he compared the Confederate flag, to many a symbol of this country’s history of slavery and discrimination, to the Palmetto tree, which is on the state flag: “What about the Palmetto tree? What if that reminds me Palmetto trees were cut down to make Fort Moultrie and that offends me?”
  
  
• In a 2-1 decision in Jones v. Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., Judge Shedd, sitting by designation on the Fourth Circuit, overturned a jury’s award in favor of the plaintiff against an asbestos manufacturer for causing his asbestosis and lung cancer. 10 Judge Shedd ruled that the manufacturer had the right to claim that the plaintiffs’ negligence in smoking should bar his entire claim against the company, despite the fact that the jury had found that the defendant’s product caused the plaintiffs’ illnesses.
  
  Judge Wilkinson, a conservative Reagan-appointee to the Fourth Circuit, dissented, writing that “[t]he jury has found that prolonged exposure to defendant’s product [asbestos] was a substantial contributing cause of plaintiff’s lung condition, and I do not think that the company may assert a defense of contributory negligence to escape all liability.” Nevertheless, Judge Shedd decided that North Carolina law allowed the defendant to rely on this contributory negligence defense.

Want more? Go here.

Shedd must be one of those "good conservative judges" Bush kept talking about prior to the 2002 elections.




posted by Quiddity at 11/20/2002 04:02:00 PM