All nine Supreme Court justices sided with Conrad Black, who played a significant role in starting up the New York Sun, in an opinion released this morning on his appeal.
It's a huge win for Lord Black, and a huge win for his lawyer, Miguel Estrada, who Senator Schumer kept off an appeals court even though he is one of the most brilliant constitutional advocates of his generation, and who might have preceded Justice Sotomayor as the first Hispanic on the high court (other than Cardozo) if Mr. Schumer hadn't gotten his way.
It's a huge defeat for Judge Richard Posner, whose Court of Appeals decision snidely dismissing Black's appeal won the support of not a single Supreme Court Justice, and was overturned in today's opinion.
It's a huge defeat for Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor in Chicago who went after Lord Black and who also was the force behind the jailing of Judith Miller and the prosecution of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
And it's a huge win for Seth Lipsky, who has been nursing in the editorial columns of the New York Sun (see, for example, here and here) the legal theory undergirding Black's appeal at a time when the other columnists, who were all more than happy to dine at Lord Black's table when he was at his heights, were ignoring the case while Lord Black languished. It's a day that makes a person proud to be an American, to live in a country that for all its problems still has a rule of law and a Constitution.
