Letter: Sowell showed little 'empathy'

The headline of Thomas Sowell’s May 6 column “Grasping ‘empathy’ versus law” is a false dichotomy befitting this column that bizarrely distorts the meaning of empathy and then obscenely compares President Obama’s “rhetoric” with “the law that gave Hitler dictatorial power.”

(For a more reasoned analysis by Douglas W. Kmiec, the conservative former Dean of Catholic University and Reagan Assistant Attorney General Office of Legal Counsel, see The Case for Empathy: Why a much-maligned value is a crucial qualification for the Supreme Court.)

Empathy – understanding other people’s perspectives – avoids biases and misunderstandings from over reliance on judges’ narrow, privileged, and insulated experience.

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court invented a theoretical “separate but equal” justification for enforced segregation. But the Brown v. Board of Education Court realized that impacts on schoolchildren were “inherently unequal” and unconstitutional.

Judges are not computers; they must understand how the U.S. Constitution and laws were written to alleviate real problems people face in many different circumstances.

President George W. Bush and a unanimous Congress restored Americans with Disabilities Act protections that were gutted when the Court misunderstood why they were written.

Glenn Sugameli

Senior Judicial Counsel

Earthjustice

Washington, D.C.