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Think Progress: Judge who ruled against offshore drilling moratorium invests in oil industry
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in response to this injunction, is going to go around it and issue his own ruling banning new offshore drilling through his department. Of the 3,600 offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, only 33 would have been affected by this moratorium anyway.
Judge Feldman is a member of the Advisory Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is Chair of the Board of Advisory Editors of the Tulane Law Review, and was the Fifth Circuit district judge representative on the Judicial Conference of the United States for the 2001-2004 term. From 1994 to 2000 he was a lecturer in Constitutional Law and war powers at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Administration. During the Fall of 2002, he was Princeton University’s Distinguished Visiting Jurist in the James Madison Program of American Ideals and Institutions [Remarks Lynn Cheney on American History]. He is a frequent James Madison lecturer at Princeton University and has been a guest lecturer at Amherst College in constitutional interpretation and the philosophy of the Rule of Law.
Chief Justice Roberts appoints Judge Feldman to the FISA Court
(NY Times) – On a September afternoon, about 60 prominent Christians assembled in the library of the Metropolitan Club on the east side of Central Park. It was a gathering of unusual diversity and power. Many in attendance were conservative evangelicals like the born-again Watergate felon Chuck Colson, who helped initiate the meeting.
At the center of the event was Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence and a Roman Catholic who is this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker.
Robert P. George receiving the Presidential Citizens Medal in December 2008
As a starting point, George had drafted a 4,700-word manifesto that promised resistance to the point of civil disobedience against any legislation that might implicate their churches or charities in abortion, embryo-destructive research or same-sex marriage.
Two months later, at a Washington press conference to present the group’s “Manhattan Declaration,” George stepped aside to let Cardinal Rigali sum up just what made the statement, and much of George’s work, distinctive. These principles did not belong to the Christian faith alone, the cardinal declared; they rested on a foundation of universal reason. “They are principles that can be known and honored by men and women of good will even apart from divine revelation,” Rigali said. “They are principles of right reason and natural law.”
Whither Art The Rule of Law?
Courts and Politics
by Judge Martin L.C. Feldman
Linked to Robert P. George and the James Madison Center, Judge Feldman is clearly a political activist and Obama critic.
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Sop is fluent in Louisiana while I, on the other hand, know little more than I’ve learned from college football and Hurricane Katrina about the State – barely enough to recognize the name Martin Feldman when I read the Fifth Circuit’s February 19, 2009 Opinion in Versai Management v Clarendon America Insurance Company et al.
Feldman is a Federal District Judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana with a biography so contrary to the Fifth’s reversal in part of his decisions in this case that I felt the need to know “who dat” this judge who made these decisions.
… Judge Feldman has been a familiar name to the members of the Firth Circuit since at least 1984 – the year the Fifth Circuit reversed his Decision in Louisiana World Exposition Inc v. R Logue because his “order did not dispose of all the matters before the District Court”.
What matters more than many times Feldman’s decisions have been appealed since that first year following his appointment to the federal bench is what those decisions that have been reversed suggest about Judge Feldman. For example, the Fifth Circuit’s 1993 Opinion “reversed and remanded” his decision in Buford v Rowan.
… Judge Feldman thus applied the law-and failed to apply it-in whatever manner was necessary in order to dismiss each and every one of the insureds’ claims, to the great relief of the insurance companies.”
We’ve profiled Ginger Berrigan and taken a few shots at Kurt Engelhardt for some of their really screwed-up/no basis in the law rulings but I think you found their grandaddy in Feldman. No wonder why David Rossmiller was genuflecting before Feldman (while again blogging on behalf of his firm’s client Allstate without disclosing that fact) while bobbing his head and writing legal fantasty in between the money shots.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."