Convictions: Slate's blog on legal issues

Open Minds and Munaf

Phil, the Supremes have time-honored words ready-made to make your Munaf point. Here's the theme, from the court's 1949 opinion in Watts (p. 52), quoted verbatim in the 2004 Padilla dissent (p. 11 n.10):

And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.

(And woman, one might add.) The theme's found, too, in this from Chief Justice Howard Taft, in the 1922 Child Labor Tax Case (p. 37):

All others can see and understand this. How can we properly shut our minds to it?