Just the Worst

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

While there are two sitting justices on the United States Supreme Court who shouldn’t be sitting on any court anywhere in the world, neither is the worst to ever perch there.

The worst, according to Bernard Schwartz — not the Bernard Schwartz I once interviewed in a trailer on a Palm Springs film set, who had the nerve to call himself Tony Curtis — is a guy you never heard of (I went to law school, and I never heard of him): Alfred Moore.

This other Bernie says Moore is worst of the worst of the Ten Worst Supreme Court Justices, in “A Book of Legal Lists.” Amazon says the book is “by the late Bernard Schwartz,” though I’m pretty sure he wasn’t dead when he wrote it.

Schwartz, quoting another dead author, says Alfred Moore “must surely be one of the most unnoticed men ever to sit on the Supreme Court.” Me, I think that was just a cheap shot: the Justice was four-foot-five so you could never really tell if he was sitting or standing.

It’s true Moore only wrote one opinion — Bas v. Tingy, 4 U.S. 37 (1800) — in his five years on the court, that it rambled on for nearly an entire page, and that it depended on the legal reasoning of what else do you call a French privateer who captures your boat except an enemy. Or something like that.

Schwartz dings Moore, not only for the one opinion, but also for managing to be absent from every significant case decided during his tenure.

But I think Bernie was a little hard on Al. Despite his stature, Moore may have been busy working on his basketball skills. Because when he left the high court, he went back home and helped establish the University of North Carolina.

Without him, we’d never have had the Tar Heels. That took a man of some forward-thinking character.

Not like some of those characters we have on there now.