This morning, President Barack Obama nominated Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by retiring Justice David Souter. Her critics, in trying to conceive of the type of justice Sotomayor would be, are pointing to comments she made at Duke during a panel discussion at the School of Law in 2005.
“All of the legal defense funds out there, they are looking for people with court of appeals experience because the court of appeals is where policy is made,” she said at the Judicial Clerkship Information Panel.
She qualified the statement, going on: “And I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. Okay, I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I know.”
It drew laughter from the audience at the time, but now some are interpreting the tape to mean that Sotomayor would be an “activist” judge. Media Matters argues that the comments have been taken out of context.
For those who were there, the statement was harmless, and not indicative of a larger activist approach. Erwin Chemerinsky, who moderated the panel, dismissed the hubbub grounded in those comments.
“I think that is much ado about nothing,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle Tuesday. “Of course, judges’ life experience influence how they see the issues and matters before them. Judge Sotomayor’s statement was innocuous and true. I think that this is grasping at straws to try and paint her a liberal.”
Chemerinsky taught constitutional law at Duke for several years and is now the founding dean of UC-Irvine’s School of Law. He added that he expected it to be an “easy confirmation.” The Senate will now have four months to complete those proceedings.
“She’s a brilliant political choice. A president always wants a nominee who will please the base, but not require a great deal of political capital,” he said. “I can’t imagine Republicans will want to try to oppose the first Latina to be nominated, especially with the growing political strength of Hispanic voters.”
Political leaders and others reacted to the announcement Tuesday, highlighted online in an NPR segment. Note that Chemerinsky–though not generally among Obama’s short-list of potential nominees–is cited by the National Lawyers Guild’s Marjorie Cohn as an intellectual who would have been a strong selection.
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The University’s International Travel Oversight Committee, a body comprising faculty and administrators to set travel policy, voted Friday to remove Mexico from the Restricted Regions list.
Though this decision clears the path for student travel, the call did not come in time to reverse the decision to move the Duke in Mexico study abroad program, according to a news release. The program has already begun in Durham. DukeEngage in Tucson, which features stints in Mexico for service work, will proceed as planned.
Officials announced April 29–at the height of news about the H1N1 virus–that they would relocate Duke in Mexico to Durham.
Students had until last week to decide whether or not they would participate despite the change of scene, and an intermediate-level program began May 15. Perhaps unsurprisingly, of the 19 students who had planned to go to Mexico, only five chose to pursue the project in the Bull City, according to the release. Two transferred to other study abroad programs.
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Duke parents bookend the Associated Press’s list of the top 10 highest-paid CEOs in the S&P 500 for 2008. The list is based on filings and estimates from Jan. 1 to April 20.
No. 1 Aubrey McClendon, Trinity ‘81, earned $112.5 million as CEO of Chesapeake Energy. Duke parent Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, closes out the top 10 with $35.7 million. McClendon and Dimon both have daughters currently enrolled at Duke; their eldest children also graduated from the University.
Both men are big bankrollers of the University, too: McClendon has given some $16 million to his alma mater, and Dimon donated $100,000 in 2006.
Despite his distinction, it might be difficult for McClendon to break out the bubbly. McClendon is auctioning 9,000 bottles of his prized wine collection. The first group fetched $2.2 million. The second sale is expected this month.
The move came after McClendon was forced to liquidate his shares in Chesapeake. He sold 94 percent of his holdings, valued at $2 billion, in accordance with margin calls after a steep decline in the stock’s price.
Seeking Alpha crunched a few numbers, and it seems McClendon made around $2,008,928 for every 1 percent his stock dropped.
In addition to stocks dropping, there also was some list movement from 2007 to 2008, when much of the financial industry was turned on its head during the deepening recession.
Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, father of a graduating senior, was 2007’s No. 2. (Thain was at the top of USA Today’s analysis.) He earned $83 million that year, but resigned this January after his bank was taken over by Bank of America. Trustee John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, was listed at No. 9 in 2007, with $41.7 million in compensation. But Mack, who remains both a Trustee and a CEO, saw his 2008 pay drop to $1.2 million for 2008.
Know of any other Duke affiliates at the top of the pay chain? Post a comment
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In December, Duke University Press will publish a dissertation by Ann Dunham, President Barack Obama’s late mother, DukeNews announced.
Dunham completed “Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia,” for the University of Hawaii in 1992, after a frequently interrupted span of 14 years. The thesis focuses Javanese craftsmen in the village of Kajar in Indonesia. Dunham examined, in 1,000 pages, how metalworking provided an economic alternative for an area dependent on rice production. Between 1988 to 1992, Dunham also worked with Bank Rakyat Indonesia to build a microfinance program.
Dunham died of ovarian cancer three years later. She was 52.
Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half-sister and Dunham’s daughter, enlisted the help of Dunham’s graduate adviser and a student who had performed research alongside her. Alice Dewey, University of Hawaii professor emeritus of anthropology, and Nancy Cooper, adjunct professor and lecturer in anthropology, revised and edited the dissertation.
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Toward the end of an interview with President Richard Brodhead last week, after he’d told me what books he read over break (for the record, among them were a biography of Obama and The Tender Bar) he confessed something:
“I taught the poet for Obama’s inauguration, you know.”
I hadn’t, but it makes sense. Brodhead, long-winded and long a lover of words, taught and chaired Yale’s English department, where Elizabeth Alexander is both a graduate and a professor. According to the Yale Daily News, Brodhead taught Alexander in a non-fiction prose writing class when she was a sophomore.
It seems that although she later turned her focus to poetry, she may have gleaned a bit about delivery from former professors, at least according to the group I was watching with. She spoke carefully, evoking the oft-mimicked cadence of the man himself.
And although Alexander was Obama’s official choice—marking only the fourth poet to be included in a presidential inauguration—The Associated Press also called on poets to compose poems to commemorate the occasion.
Alexander was selected for the 2007 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers by Lucille Clifton, Stephen Dunn, and Jane Hirshfield. Hirshfield spent a recent Fall weekend at Duke as the Blackburn visiting poet.
The poem will be released in a chapbook Feb. 6, according to the AP.
Mike Munger, the Libertarian candidate for governor and chair of Duke’s political science department, reflected on his bid in a DukeNews YouTube clip Wednesday, calling it “one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever been so glad is finished.”
Results show he secured just under 3 percent of the vote, meaning Libertarian candidates will remain on the ballot through 2012. Munger passed the threshold required by North Carolina’s ballot access law, one of the most rigid in the country for Libertarians to automatically be placed on the ballot. He captured 120,000 votes Tuesday, but to get on the ballot in the first place he had to petition for more than 100,000 signatures.
He’ll resume focus on teaching (throughout the campaign, he never stopped), but according to the Independent Weekly, Munger isn’t finished campaigning just yet. At a party at Raleigh’s University Club, he announced he would seek the State Senate seat in 2010, and his campaign manager Barbara Howe told The Chronicle Tuesday that he hadn’t ruled out another run for the state’s top spot in 2012.
In the clip, he also comments on parties, and the impact Democratic support had on Barack Obama’s election. “The main reason Barack Obama won… was the ground game they played here in North Carolina.”
Having played some ground game himself, logging tens of thousands of miles campaigning across the state, he says he has new perspective to inform his teaching.
“Anyone who teaches political science should have lost an election,” he jokes.
Here’s betting his political science class had a rousing discussion today.
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