What the Supreme Court Justices do

My own cynical thought is that Supreme Court Justices have already developed pretty thorough moral and political opinions about a lot of things--especially about controversial issues--and that, as a result, they spend most of their jurisdictional energy crafting official written opinions that bring their professed interpretations of the Constitution or current law into harmony with those precise moral and political opinions. I don't, however, actually know enough about anything to support this belief. It's just been my experience that the above dynamic describes about 53 percent of the world.

Here, fortunately, is a fascinating article that gets pretty specific about Justices' daily duties:

When people think, if they ever do, about a Supreme Court justice’s daily routine, many undoubtedly envision a life spent contemplating the great issues: due process, equal protection and other resonant constitutional concepts.      

What they probably do not imagine is time spent puzzling over whether the phrase “within 75 miles” in a 1993 federal statute means miles as the crow flies — in a straight line that disregards hill and dale — or miles as a car must actually navigate on the ground: around curves, doubling back to avoid geographic barriers, traveling real roads that rarely mark the shortest distance between two points.

The difference between the two possible definitions of “within 75 miles” usually does not matter much. But when it matters, it matters a lot, as it does to a former insurance executive from Oklahoma, Kelly Hackworth.

If the distance between two of her former employer’s offices is measured by “radius miles,” a straight line on the map, Ms. Hackworth was entitled to the protections of the Family and Medical Leave Act when she lost her job after taking time off to take care of her hospitalized mother. The law applies to companies that employ at least 50 people within 75 miles of the complaining employee’s workplace. If the distance between Ms. Hackworth’s office in Norman, Okla., and a satellite office in Lawton is measured by driving the route along existing roads, she is out of luck by six-tenths of a mile, which is what the federal appeals court in Denver ruled a few months ago.

What's good is that this vignette enjoys the two fine qualities of being interesting and of supporting my view of the judicial world. See, there's positively no reason to define 75 miles the way the Denver court did. Mainly because that definition will change over time as roads are built, etc., but also because that ruling is inherently biased in favor of people who live in higher-density, straight-road-having parts of the country and against disproportionately poor people in rural areas. If Ms. Hackworth had lots money she could have rendered this all moot by building a road! (Or by moving closer to work or whathaveyou.) As it is, she's being penalized because public roads don't always run in straight lines, spiderwebbing out from important corporate headquarters directly to the homes or neighborhoods of their valued employees.

My impression is that the appeals court--stacked by conservatives--ruled this way because it's the obvious judgement to make if you think business, to the greatest extent possible, should not be unconstrained by labor-friendly legislation. Not, mind you, because reading the legislation this way makes any sense. So this will go to the Supreme Court where, I'll venture, in a heavily split vote, labor friendly justices will rule with Hackworth and business friendly justices will ignore this: "[A]s reflected in The Congressional Record, there were several references to a “75-mile radius,” suggesting a straight line," and support the lower court, which ruled thus:

[T]he United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit refused to make that leap. Congress simply “did not define a method of measuring,” the appeals court said, and “therefore left an implicit statutory gap” that the Department of Labor was authorized to fill by regulation. The department adopted a regulation in 1995 providing that the distance should be measured as “surface miles using surface transportation.” That definition was entitled to deference, the 10th Circuit concluded.

And the heady business of being a Supreme Court justice will continue unabated.