Oregon's next Supreme Court justice?

Gullyborg has a great interview he scored with Jack Roberts (former Oregon Republican gubernatorial candidate, former state labor commissioner, former county commissioner, etc.), who is considering a run at the state supreme court to replace the retiring Chief Justice Wallace Carson.

Even though Roberts is pro-choice, I've always admired him, starting when I was a student at Oregon and he was a Lane County Commissioner. Read the whole thing, long though it is, but here are a few snippits.

On why he's considering a run:

The main reason I’m interested in running is that there is a real disconnect between the Supreme Court and the people of Oregon. We elect our judges for a reason: we don’t expect them to be political in their decisions, but we expect them to know who they work for, and to be able to communicate what they do to the people, and to connect to the people. It helps to have on the bench a diversity of people from different backgrounds and experience. Right now, we don’t really have that.
...
the recent case on live sex acts reminds us that there is a whole line of cases...that I think have room for a lot of debate and discussion, and I’d like to be a part of that. I think that we have to be able to formulate a rule of law that most people in this state can understand and accept, and I don’t think we’re there as it relates to free speech… even though I think Oregonians broadly support free speech; in fact, in 1996, there was a ballot measure that would have said “do you want the Oregon free speech provision to be interpreted the same way as the federal free speech provision,” and it lost. People understand that we have broader protection here and they wanted that. But I still think you ought to have a rule that is understandable and can be communicated to people, and I don’t think the current rule that we have makes sense. We need to have that discussion.

So there are plenty of issues where we need to take a fresh look, and not just say we are going to come up through the system and accept all the precedents and past history as a given, without asking the question “is this really doing the job that the people of Oregon want and expect as required by our Constitution?”

On ruling with the law vs. providing justice:

Well, the job really is to enforce and interpret the law. However tempted you might be to bend the law to do justice in a particular case, the precedent you will set by doing that can result in real injustice in a lot of other cases. Now, by the same token, there is often a lot of discretion in the law, judgment in the law, and I’ve never believed that you decide cases based on ironclad formulas. The good justices over the years, people like Justice Holmes, Justice Cardozo, Judge Learned Hand, these are people who, I think, had a realistic view of how to take the law, and apply it in a way that makes sense.

I think that if you’re a judge, and you’re not prepared to make a decision that you don’t agree with from a policy standpoint but you know is right in a legal sense, you shouldn’t be a judge. But by the same token, if your judicial philosophy results in a crazy decision, one that doesn’t make any sense to any parties, but you say “this is how my judicial formula applies,” which is what I think sometimes with [Richard] Posner, then you have to step back and re-evaluate, and say “how can I say this is right if the outcome is so crazy?” I’m going to resist the temptation to name some recent cases where I think this has happened…

I think you need some grounding in good common sense, in real life, in the real world. But you can’t be twisting the law in every case to do what you want it to do and call that being a judge. That’s not the job of a judge.

On why the Supreme Court of Oregon needs Jack Roberts:

A: To bring common sense back to the court.
Q: Are you saying there isn't any common sense on the court?
A: Let’s just say they can always use more.