{"id":403,"date":"2016-07-15T09:24:28","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T13:24:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/?p=403"},"modified":"2021-04-19T16:01:06","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T20:01:06","slug":"justice-ginsburgs-statement-of-regret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/justice-ginsburgs-statement-of-regret\/","title":{"rendered":"Justice Ginsburg’s Statement of Regret"},"content":{"rendered":"

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave some interviews last week (the Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times) in which she expressed her personal opinion about the prospect of Donald Trump as president. Her comments about him were not kind, and were widely criticized<\/a> as inappropriate for a member of the Supreme Court. Yesterday, she issued the following statement<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cOn reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised, and I regret making them. Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.\u201d<\/p>\n

The media is referring to this as\u00a0an apology, but is it a good one? A good apology needs to meet criteria summarized in \u201cthe four R\u2019s\u201d \u2013 Regret, Responsibility, Repair, and Refrain from repeating that behavior. Her statement basically does that, although it could do a better job.\u00a0 For example, to characterize her remarks as “ill-advised” implies that someone advised her; she could’ve come up with a stronger adjective, like, “wrong.” And adding the phrase, “in response to press inquiries” almost implies that the media were as responsible as she was,\u00a0belying the fact that\u00a0she voluntarily gave these interviews,\u00a0something justices traditionally refrain from doing.<\/p>\n

Peacemaker Ministries uses seven criteria<\/a> for developing a good apology, and one of them is to \u201cacknowledge the hurt\u201d \u2013 in other words, to acknowledge the impact of the offense upon the \u201cvictim(s).\u201d Perhaps that\u2019s what\u2019s missing in Justice Ginsburg\u2019s statement, and her subsequent remarks <\/a>about it \u2013 not only does she not acknowledge the personal impact of publicly criticizing someone, she doesn\u2019t acknowledge the impact on her role as justice, and\u00a0on the whole Supreme Court. One almost gets the sense that she regrets the uproar, but still retains some satisfaction in having spoken her mind.<\/p>\n

In the court of public opinion, this statement may not set her free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave some interviews last week (the Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times) in which she expressed her personal opinion about the prospect of Donald Trump as president. Her comments about him were not kind, and were widely criticized as inappropriate for a member of the Supreme Court. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apologies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions\/404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abfifer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}