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What confirmation mess? Stephen Carter's new book decries the state of the confirmation process, especially for Supreme Court nominees. "The confirmation mess," in Carter's (noninterrogatory) phrase, consists of both the brutalization and the politicization of the process by which the nation selects its highest judges. That process, Carter insists, is replete with meanness, dishonesty, and distortion. More, and worse, it demands of nominees that they reveal their views on important legal issues, thus threatening to limit the Court "to people who have adequately demonstrated their closedmindedness" (p xi). A misguided focus on the results of controversial cases and on the probable voting patterns of would-be Justices, Carter argues, produces a noxious and destructive process. Carter's paradigm case, almost needless to say, is the failed nomination of Robert Bork.

Radin, and this author). 3. See Brooks, supra note 1 (proposing incremental reforms and new programs); Delgado, supra note 2, at 933-37 (functions of normativity generally).

Shortly after a New York jury acquitted Bernhard Goetz of charges that he had attempted murder by rising angrily from his subway bench and shooting down four youths who were, in the polite euphemism of the street, hassling him for money, a syndicated cartoonist was inspired to draw what was intended to be the post-Goetz subway car. The imagery was at once stark and homely: two elderly women seated side-by-side in a car empty of other passengers, a screwdriver lying nearby, and outside, a crowd of people, eyes widened with fear, running away from the car. One of the women says to the other: "Heavens!. . .I was just reaching for my lipstick."' Such evocation in a simple cartoon! For the artist managed, with those seven words, to capture the shuddering tensions apparent in public reactions to the Goetz incident and the verdict in his trial, and much more besides. Mr. Goetz's public-those who declared him a hero from the first-can find in this cartoon a portrait of salvation of a sort. The people fleeing are thugs and toughs, the anonymous yet ubiquitous individuals who frequent New York's subway trains and cast terror with a glance. Now they must think twice about their victims. If those who are frightened can defend themselves with violence, then every honest and angry subway rider is a threat to those who have made the subway a violent place. Even intimidating a little old lady no longer promises gain without o Stephen L. Carter t Professor of Law, Yale University. An earlier version of this essay was presented at a Yale Law School Faculty Workshop. In addition to the questions raised there, I have had the special benefit of suggestions and criticisms, on either the essay or the ideas behind it, from