Legal Beat

In an essay on judicial selection for the next edition of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Utah Republican Orrin G. Hatch argues that judges should stick to interpreting the law, rather than making it.

Originally delivered as a speech in Boston last month, the essay serves as an early warning shot to President Obama that conservative Republicans do not put much stock in the notion that judges should be empathetic on the bench.

"I hope that the debate over President Obama's judicial nominees will really be a debate over the kind of judge our liberty requires," wrote Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "The debate should be about whether judges decide cases by using enduring mandates and impersonal rules of law or by using their own moral reflections and personal impressions."