Gary Johnson's Supreme Court Picks Would Add More 'Diversity' To The Court

As a purely intellectual exercise, I don't hate these picks.

 (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate for a job that he barely thinks should exist, announced some potential Supreme Court picks. Johnson has seemingly gone out of his way to show how unprepared he was for the Republicans to drop this giant gift of a candidate into his laissez-faire lap, but his SCOTUS suggestions are interesting.

In an interview last week (which I didn’t notice… because I’m kind of focused on the two people who might actually become president), Johnson said his top choices for the Supreme Court would be Jonathan Turley or Tom Campbell. Turley is a well-known legal commentator and law professor at George Washington Law School. Campbell is a former Congressman and a law professor at Chapman.

As a purely intellectual exercise, I don’t hate these picks. Campbell is a law-and-economics Republican who would probably allow the Court to continue being the most pro-corporate collection of justices in American history. Turley is a civil libertarian who thinks the Second Amendment condemns us all to living in an armed hellscape. Both of these guys studied at the University of Chicago at some point. We’d be getting robust defenses of the market’s supremacy to solve issues for us from either of these guys.

BUT THEY’RE NOT PROSECUTORS. Yes, their legal experience is more theoretical than practical, but here are two guys who haven’t made their bones in the incarceration-industrial complex. Turley has media experience, Campbell has political experience. Nobody on the current Court has much of either. Yes, they’re both white males. Libertarians aren’t good at making an argument to the people for whom the invisible hand represents a glass ceiling. But there is more than one kind of diversity needed on the Court, and these guys would add some much-needed professional diversity to the Court.

And, these guy would represent some interesting swing votes. Turley has the benefit/disadvantage of being on the record with many of his views. We know that he thinks that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, but we also know he thinks the death penalty is wrong. We know he’s no fan of executive action. It would be interesting to throw him into the mix.

Of course, his lack of purity along the social issues either Democrats or Republicans care about, along with his long public record, means that there’s no chance he’ll ever sit on the Court. Even if Johnson wins (just play along with the thought experiment), I’d bet Turley’s confirmation process would be more trouble than it was worth. As a Congressman, Campbell has a voting record that could be marshaled against him.

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But it would be interesting to have a Supreme Court justice who has some “non-lawyer” experiences. It would be interesting to have a Supreme Court justice who didn’t hit all the notes on an ideological litmus test. It would be interesting to have a true swing justice.

I guess what I’m saying is: Here’s one thing Gary Johnson said that wasn’t woefully unprepared, practically impossible, or made him sound like he was freaking high. It’s fun to imagine a world where “conservative” principles are what Turley or Campbell would bring to the table, instead of the bigoted anti-gay rhetoric of Antonin Scalia. One can dream.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming of dispiriting awfulness and civic destruction.

Libertarian presidential candidate names two law profs as potential SCOTUS picks [ABA Journal]


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Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He would promise the most fun confirmation hearing ever if he were nominated.