Harriet Miers Wrap Up

A photo of Harriet Miers from usinfo.state.gov
While the shouting among the pundits is sure to continue for days to come, Ms. Miers today officially withdrew her name from consideration as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The text of her letter to President Bush (with a link to a .pdf copy of the complete letter) is available in the Jurist Gazette item: Miers Supreme Court Nomination Withdrawal Letter.

When it's all said and done, perhaps it is the deathless prose of Miss Emily Litella that best sums up the Miers nomination:

Never Mind.

Posted by on October 27, 2005 in Blawgs, Blogs & Podcasts, Harriet Miers Nomination | | Comments (0)

Supreme Court Nomination Transcripts - Westlaw's Collection

Westlaw's new "Supreme Court Nominee Confirmation Hearings" (SCT-CONFIRM) database gives subscribers a convenient way to pull up transcripts of Supreme Court nomination hearings. Coverage begins with the 1971 hearings on William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and unofficial transcripts of the John Roberts hearings are already available.

In most instances Westlaw provides the official PDF files from Congress, which means that researchers can't search for words (like "constitutional") within the transcripts. The best they can do is download or print the entire document.

To retrieve the transcripts of the Roberts hearing, enter:

john +2 roberts

To retrieve transcripts of other hearings, follow this pattern:

title(firstname +2 lastname)

For example:

title(anthony +2 kennedy)
title(ruth +2 ginsburg)

Posted by on October 23, 2005 in Harriet Miers Nomination, John Roberts Nomination, New on Lexis/Westlaw | | Comments (0)

Miers Senate Judiciary Questionnaire (and more!) - Let the Parsing Begin

More fodder for the pundits: Jurist-Gazette, in an item entitled Miers Confirmation Questionnaire, alerts us that Harriet Miers has submitted answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee's extensive questionnaire.

The 57-page PDF file, United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary: Nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States, is available directly from Jurist.

SCOTUSBlog's Lyle Denniston has this early assessment: Analysis: Miers on the Constitution.

And in his post Where to Find the Miers Questionnaire, Robert Ambrogi reports that NPR and AP have not only the Senate Judiciary Questionnaire, but also financial disclosure statements and responses to surveys from Texans United For Life and the Dallas Eagle Forum. NPR's Meirs coverage (with links to documents) and the AP collection of documents are:

Posted by on October 18, 2005 in Harriet Miers Nomination, Surfing the Web | | Comments (0)

Harriet Miers - More Tea Leaves

The Law Library of Congress has now weighed in with its own collection of information about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. Supreme Court Nominations - Harriet E. Miers:Selected Resources in the Law Library Reading Room, lists articles by Ms. Miers (with links to those that are on the web) and links to web sites about her, her nomination, and the Supreme Court nomination process in general.

[Thanks to the folks at University of San Diego's lrc-orbit for the tip!]

Posted by on October 11, 2005 in Harriet Miers Nomination, Surfing the Web | | Comments (0)

A Growing Paper Trail for Harriet Miers?

Perhaps in the age of the Internet no one lacks a paper trail.... In any event, each day a little more information on Harriet Miers comes to light.

Our colleagues at SMU's Underwood Law Library have brought together the Published Writings of Harriet E. Miers, Nominee for Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court.

And over at the Dallas News, their reporting on the Miers nomination includes a story "Law Professors Comment on Miers Article"  (Dallas News, Weds., Oct. 5, 2005), which discusses and links to the case note Ms. Miers wrote for SMU's law review while she was in law school. [Access is free, but registration is required.]

[Thanks to the Law Librarian Blog and to Michael Ravnitzky for the tips!]

Posted by on October 09, 2005 in Harriet Miers Nomination, Surfing the Web | | Comments (0)

Harriet Miers Revealed (?)

How to understand Harriet Miers, this nominee-without-a-paper-trail? The folks over at the University of Michigan Law Library have done their best by presenting a collection of links and references to such sources as exist. Their Hot Topics: Information on Harriet Miers, Nominee for Justice of the Supreme Court, covers basic biographical information, cases in which Miers was counsel, articles by and about Miers, and will cover the confirmation hearings, when the time comes.  [Thanks to Jim Milles of ublaw phoenix for the tip!]

Our colleages at the Law Librarian Blog are also doing their part, with In re Harriet Miers: Some Resources, and over at SCOTUSBlog, they are periodically rounding up  commentary and news. So far, they have posted:

Posted by on October 05, 2005 in Harriet Miers Nomination, Surfing the Web | | Comments (0)

Supreme Court Nominations - Source Documents

The tireless folks at the Library of Congress's Law Library Reading Room have just launched these two collections of source documents on recent Supreme Court Nominations. The documents include floor debates (Senate debate while in Executive Session), votes, hearing transcripts, and Senate statements (statements made about the nominees outside of Executive Session).

Beware! These documents are all in PDF format and some are quite large.

[Thanks to Emily Carr, Legal Reference Specialist at the Law Library of Congress, for the tip!]

Posted by on September 15, 2005 in Harriet Miers Nomination, John Roberts Nomination, Surfing the Web | | Comments (0)

New Supreme Court Nominations Guide from Georgetown

Georgetown's Edward Bennett Williams Law Library has an excellent new guide, U.S. Supreme Court Nominations: In-Depth Research, on the Supreme Court nominations process. The guide includes detailed information on the process itself, on the current nominee, John Roberts, on lobbying groups, and on past confirmation failures.

[Thanks to the folks at slaw for the tip!]

Posted by on August 29, 2005 in Harriet Miers Nomination, John Roberts Nomination, Surfing the Web | | Comments (0)