[link|http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner-antihero.html|Holy smear job, Batman!]

Excerpt:

From my account, Murphy's book may seem a hatchet job, with its mountain of often prurient detail about Douglas's personal life and character. Not so. Murphy displays no animus toward Douglas. He does not try to extenuate Douglas's failings as a human being, or to excuse them, or even to explain them, but he greatly admires Douglas's civil liberties decisions, and (without his actually saying so) this admiration leads him to forgive Douglas's flaws of character. The only time his realism regarding Douglas's character falters is when he is discussing Felix Frankfurter. His portrayal of Frankfurter is relentlessly and excessively critical; he sees Frankfurter exclusively through Douglas's hostile eyes.

Murphy is right to separate the personal from the judicial. One can be a bad person and a good judge, just as one can be a good person and a bad judge.

I say:

Politically correct ideology covers over a multitude of sins. Maybe that's why some of the worst assholes wrap themselves in the flag of 20th century "liberalism."