I'm a bit of a Supreme Court junkie -- and have been ever since I read Woodward and Armstrong's The Brethren as a teenager. And one of the realities that I have long struggled with is that the dry focus on precedents and case law obscures the individual appellants and respondents in the cases -- the folks whose lives are the fodder for the decisions rendered by the justices.

The Washington Post does a nice article on one of the individuals at the heart of one of this year's cases, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

Lilly M. Ledbetter says she almost stopped breathing when she heard her name called that day, her eight-year battle over alleged pay discrimination finally reaching the ultimate legal forum, the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We'll hear argument next in Ledbetter versus Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. announced.

The odds are akin to being struck by lightning, having your case plucked from the thousands of others who have vowed, like you, to take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court. And then you find it's not so much about you anymore.

It was the only time that November morning that any of the nine justices spoke Lilly Ledbetter's name.

When she thought back last week on the arguments before the court, she remembered them as not being much about her complaints about Goodyear, or Goodyear's complaints about her. "Except when my lawyer got up, it [seemed to be] based on changing the law somewhere down the line," she said. "That's what it boils down to, I guess. It tends to leave the person out."

And Ledbetter has it exactly right, as a couple of the justices have publicly acknowledged.

At a forum late last year, Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer, usually the court's yin and yang on matters of constitutional interpretation, agreed that that is how it should be. They were asked whether their duty was to provide justice for those who came before the court or simply to interpret the law.

"The point of the law is to satisfy a human desire for justice," Breyer explained, but he added: "You don't necessarily get to that end by simply trying to look for what is the intuitively nicer result in each case."

Scalia was blunter. "By the time you get up to an appellate court -- and lawyers ought to learn this -- I don't much care about your particular case," he said. "I am not about to produce a better result in your case at the expense of creating terrible results in a hundred other cases."

And that is as it should be, as cold and hard-hearted as it might sound. Court decisions at this level are about the law, since the facts have long since been vetted at the trial court level. These cases are about the broad principles and not the individual circumstances that are impacted by them. Indeed, the justices at this level serve as legal technicians.

But it is still important to remember that there are faces that go with these cases -- and I thank the Washington Post for reminding us of that.

Posted by: Greg at 11:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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