Arizona Voters Keep Libertarian Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick
Control of the presidency and Congress weren’t the only important matters on the ballot this week. In Arizona, voters chose to keep Clint Bolick, a prominent libertarian legal mind, on the state’s Supreme Court. Arizona judges face periodic retention elections which are usually routine matters, rarely resulting in anybody losing their seat. This year, though, Bolick and another justice were targeted after a controversial abortion decision; despite the campaign against them, both cruised to victory.
Co-Founder of the Institute for Justice
Bolick is probably best known beyond Arizona as the co-founder, with the late Chip Mellor, of the Institute for Justice (I.J.) in 1991. The organization’s timeline notes that it started small, “with Chip Mellor, Clint Bolick, Scott Bullock, and two other staff members.”
“When Chip and Clint created the Institute for Justice in 1991, their most ambitious goal was to resurrect the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause as the primary source of protection for individual rights against state and local governments—including particularly the right of occupational freedom,” Clark Neily, a former IJ staffer, wrote for the Cato Institute after Mellor passed away last month.
Earlier in Bolick’s career, I briefly corresponded with him (not that I think Bolick remembers) after reading his 1990 book, Unfinished Business: A Civil Rights Strategy for America’s Third Century. That book helped confirm my decision to go to law school and the path I wanted to pursue as an attorney.
Through no fault of Bolick’s, I dropped out of law school in favor of other pursuits, ultimately culminating in what I’m doing now. Bolick himself moved on from I.J. to serve as president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice, where he litigated on behalf of education freedom.
In 2007, Bolick joined Arizona’s Goldwater Institute, where he headed up its litigation efforts. “Bolick has successfully won landmark precedents defending school choice, freedom of enterprise, private property rights and challenging corporate subsidies and racial classifications,” according to a 2014 profile by Townhall’s Rachel Alexander.
In 2016, Bolick told Reason‘s Damon Root that his favorite case was a lawsuit that inspired first Texas, and then Congress, to pass “legislation making it illegal for public entities to discriminate in adoption placement” with a particular emphasis on barring racial considerations.
An Immediate Target on the Arizona Supreme Court
That year, Republican Doug Ducey, Arizona’s then-governor, appointed Bolick to the state Supreme Court, He became the first registered Independent on that body, and almost certainly the first to sport a scorpion tattoo on his hand, celebrating a victory in a tattoo studio’s free speech case. The court’s caseload spans
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