Check out today's HotWired at http://www.hotwired.com/ for the full article. -Declan -------------- http://www.hotwired.com/netizen/96/25/campaign_dispatch4a.html HotWired: The Netizen The Tenth Justice by Brock N. Meeks (brock@well.com) and Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) Washington, DC, 20 June 1996 Little known and unheralded outside judicial circles, U.S. Solicitor General Drew Days will soon play a key role in the continuing saga of the Communications Decency Act: it's now up to Days to vote thumbs up or down on sending the case to the Supreme Court. Days's decision carries enormous weight with the Supreme Court justices. "The solicitor general is known as the tenth justice," says Llew Gibbons, Temple University law fellow. "He has that much power before the court. It's a level of credibility nobody else has." Although the solicitor general - the No. 3 spot in the Department of Justice - is a political appointee, the job has historically been above politics; as Gibbons says, the solicitor general's real client is the Constitution. At the same time, it's a coveted position widely seen as a steppingstone to a seat on the Supreme Court, as it was for Thurgood Marshall. In addition, the job's independence allows the solicitor general to rule according to his understanding of constitutional law, not party allegiance - which is why Days's decision on the CDA will carry so much weight with the high court. Nonetheless, as independent and influential as Days may be, should he decide not to send the case on, he could still be overruled by Attorney General Janet Reno. Days has traveled this road before. Shortly after he took office in 1993, he wrote a decision arguing that the Bush administration had screwed up in sending a controversial child pornography case to the Supreme Court. The court, having already decided to take the case, reversed itself and, on the strength of Days's argument, sent it back to the appeals court. [...]