empathy

I tend not to read a lot of the political commentary on Supreme Court nominations because it's generally too predictable to be interesting. Unfortunately I was stuck in the dentist's waiting room with a choice of parenting magazines (sorry, no room here for my opinion of the very narrow targeted market audience for parenting magazines), celebrity gossip magazines and Newsweek, so I ended up reading Dahlia Lithwick's piece on the Justice Stephen's retirement...

Stevens’s Real Legacy

Like I said, generally predictable, but there were two points that I found noteworthy.

Point one, Lithwick claims "...Americans now begin the ritual clamor for a court that looks more like them..." I think she's painting with a pretty broad brush. Beyond the echo chamber of the punditry, I doubt seriously if "looks like me" ranks anywhere close to the top of most people's list of qualifications for a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court.

Point two, Lithwick opens her last paragraph with this...
"Empathy isn't emotional incontinence and it isn't fudging the law to help the little guy. Empathy is the power to imagine a world outside your experience, and to map that understanding onto the law."

Now I'm a little baffled (get used to it, it'll be a recurring theme). What exactly could "map that understanding onto the law" mean other than to read something into the law that isn't explicitly there in order to favor the individual with whom the justice is empathizing? If not, what's the point? 'I understand your perspective and feel for you, but the law still says you don't get your way?' It's more than a little absurd the lengths to which leftists will go to talk around the fact that they want justices to legislate from the bench.

I'd like to close with a little thought exercise. Try to picture Lithwick's reaction if she was party to a lawsuit, and during jury selection her lawyer chose not to challenge the inclusion of any jurors who admitted that rather than evaluating the evidence and testimony in light of the black letter of the law they'd imagine the world of her opposition's experience and map that understanding onto the case. You think she'd realize that maybe empathy has no place in a court of law after all?