POLITICO: A federal appeals court judge said Friday that he erred when writing a decision which served as a key precursor to the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling upholding the constitutionality of Indiana’s voter ID law…
[Seventh Circuit Judge Richard ] Posner authored the 2-1 opinion in Crawford v. Marion County, which likely influenced the
Supreme Court in its 6-3 decision upholding the statute in the same case.
“There was a dissenting judge [on the appeals court panel], Judge Terence Evans, since deceased, and I think he was right,”
Posner said. “But at the time I thought what we were doing was right. It is interesting that the majority opinion was written by Justice [John Paul] Stevens, who is very liberal, more liberal than I was or am…. But I think we did not have enough information. And of course it illustrates the basic problem that I emphasize in [my new] book. We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.” … (more)
