Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik cites the historic Buck vs. Bell case to endorse Sonia Sotomayor’s claim that a judge’s ethnic and socioeconomic background could enhance their interpretation of the law and ability to empathize. The 1927 case upheld a Virginia law allowing the forced sterilization of people deemed “defectives” and “manifestly unfit.”

Hiltzik says Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Harvard-educated son of an eminent Boston physician, was reflecting his elite upbringing and the culture of the establishment when he led the court in endorsing the pseudo-science of eugenics in the Buck decision. In doing so, Hiltzik says, Holmes produced one of the most infamous sentences in the annals of the court: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

An excerpt:

Might the outcome of Buck vs. Bell have been different were the court not monolithic? [Historian William E. Leuchtenburg] thinks so.

“It’s hard to believe that one or two women justices might not have made a difference,” he told me from his home near the University of North Carolina, where he is a professor emeritus. “They might have made the other justices confront what was at issue.”

… But to deny that the character and experience of judges helps to make law is foolish. Virginia sterilized more than 7,500 men and women before ceasing the practice in 1979 — second only to California, where 20,000 operations were performed. Nationwide, the toll was 60,000. How many would have been saved, one wonders, had the court showed a little “empathy”?

See previous posts on eugenic sterilization, including:

• Book examines high court support for sterilization of ‘unfit’
• Exhibit explores war on ‘genetically unfit’

See also: State issues apology for policy of sterilization — Los Angeles Times

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 7:44 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, Obama administration, eugenics, families, history, intellectual/developmental disabilities, law, personal stories, sterilization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post