agenda in any direction on i m a judge. i m just trying to resolve the precedent let me close by saying this. i m just a judge, i just follow precedent. gosh, we ve heard that so often and i hope it s the case. we know there s more to your job than that. i agree. the fact that you were a dissenter and everyone else saw this the other way should give us pause when you say i m just following precedent. respectfully, senator, that opinion, i m proud of that opinion because i think it carefully details the law in that case. i m following the supreme court precedent. to your point that other judges disagree, there was a case i had about ten years ago or eight years ago called papanyo. a case where i ruled in favor of a criminal defendant on a restitution matter. i wrote the majority opinion. every other court after it s disagreed. finalry got to the supreme court
law of judicial precedent. i checked it out. it s 900 pages long. i haven t read every page of it either. it s not meant to be read word for word. it s a treatise where you go to a section that might be on point or something. let me ask you a more basic question and we can work our way into that. should when people go to court, should they expect a different outcome if the judge was nominated by a republican from a court where the judge was nominated by a democrat? no. that s an important principle of judicial independence and the judicial role. the judge s umpire, chief justice roberts articulated and i talked about publicly many times is critical. when you go to a baseball game, the umpire is not wearing the uniform of one team or another. that s a critical principle. it strikes me as an important point give the suggestion that one of the reasons people have
chief justice warren had, the fact that it understood the real world consequences of the segregation on the african american students that were segregated into other schools and stamped with a badge of inferiority, that moment in brown versus board of education is so critical to remember and the opinion is so inspirational. it s a relatively short within. but it s very powerful, very focused on the text of the equal protection clause and correcting that awful precedent of plessy versus ferguson. a great example of leadership. the last point on process. they were they knew they were growing to face popular backlash. they knew it but still did it. that shows independence and fortitude. they also had reargument, which is a good they had argument originally and decided there s a lot going on and maybe not
i have always had a little bit of a problem with that line. we re infallible because we re final. no. both parts of that are wrong in some sense. i never want to think of the court as infallible. i never want to think of it necessarily in the way you re describing either. the people always have an ability to correct through the amendment process. the amendment process is hard. hasn t been used as much in recent decades. of course, at the beginning of the country, the amendments were critical. dread scott, of course, the awful example of just a horrific supreme court decision that is then corrected in part at least on paper in the 14th amendment, 13th, 14th amendment. that s an important example of the probably the best example of the point you re making about the people being able to respond
talk to but could consult with if she wanted about the decision facing her. so we had to analyze this first as a minor and then for me the first question always what is the precedent. the precedent on point from the supreme court is there is no case on exact points, so you do what you do in all cases. you reason by analogy from the closest thing on point. what is the closest body of long point? the parental dissent decisions of the supreme court where they upheld parental concession over dissenters that thought that they would delay the procedure too long. up to several weeks. i m getting to the point. before you get to the point, you ve just bypassed something. you just bypassed the judicial bypass, which she received from the state of texas when it came to parental consent. that already happened here.