editorial comment paraphernalia can't wait to hear her views on drugs. We can only suppose that she will support more government involvement, and call that freedom....

Janice Rogers Brown, the African-American daughter of Alabama sharecroppers who was confirmed Wednesday to the federal appeals court here, often invokes slavery in describing what she sees as the perils of liberalism.

Roll-Call Vote on Justice Brown"In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery," she has warned in speeches. Society and the courts have turned away from the founders' emphasis on personal responsibility, she has argued, toward a culture of government regulation and dependency that threatens fundamental freedoms.

"We no longer find slavery abhorrent," she told the conservative Federalist Society a few years ago. "We embrace it." She explained in another speech, "If we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression."

To her critics, such remarks are evidence of extremism. This week, some Senate Democrats have even singled her out as the most objectionable of President Bush's more than 200 judicial nominees, citing her criticism of affirmative action and abortion rights but most of all her sweeping denunciations of New Deal legal precedents that enabled many federal regulations and social programs - developments she has called "the triumph of our socialist revolution."

Her friends and supporters say her views of slavery underpin her judicial philosophy. It was her study of that history, they say, combined with her evangelical Christian faith and her self-propelled rise from poverty that led her to abandon the liberal views she learned from her family.

"We discuss things like, 'How did slavery happen?' " said her friend and mentor Steve Merksamer, a lawyer in Sacramento, Calif. "It comes down to the fact that she believes, as I do, that some things are, in fact, right and some things are, in fact, wrong. Segregation - even though the courts had sustained it for a hundred years - was morally indefensible and legally indefensible and yet it was the law of the land," he said. "She brings that philosophy to her legal work."

On the California Supreme Court, her opinions have reflected the philosophy and language of her speeches. In an opinion involving fees charged to San Francisco hotel owners, for example, she proclaimed that "private property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco." In an affirmative action case, she criticized "entitlement programs based on group representation." And in a case involving Nike's labor practices, she compared the United States Supreme Court to "a wizard trained at Hogwarts" conjuring up distinctions about commercial speech that she said restricted businesses' freedoms.

On Wednesday, two years after President Bush first nominated her, the Senate voted 56 to 43 to confirm Justice Brown. She was the second of three appellate court nominees who had been blocked by Senate Democrats until a compromise was reached a few weeks ago. Immediately after her confirmation, the Senate voted 67 to 32 to close debate on the third stalled nominee, Judge William H. Pryor Jr., setting the stage for a vote on him on Thursday.

Justice Brown, though, was the focus of special attention from both sides in the Senate. For one thing, she was named to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, widely considered the most influential appellate court and almost evenly divided between Republican and Democratic appointees. And even before her confirmation, she was often cited as a potential candidate for the Supreme Court, in part because of her politically appealing life story.

She was born Janice Olivia Allen in Greenville, Ala., in 1949, five years before the Supreme Court struck down segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. After returning from service in World War II, her father grew cotton, corn and peanuts on a 158-acre plot he leased about 25 miles away, said Havard Richburg, a friend of the family. Her parents split up, and she was raised primarily by her grandmother, Beulah Allen, until her teenage years, when her mother, a nurse, took her to Sacramento. (Her mother remarried, adding the name Rogers.)

Her family was involved in the voting rights movement in Alabama and became liberal Democrats. She was inspired to become a lawyer by the career of Fred D. Gray, an Alabama civil rights lawyer who represented Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Justice Brown has said she initially shared her family's views, but over the years became more conservative in her thinking.


Roll-Call Vote on Justice BrownIn California, she made her way through Sacramento State University in part by working at the Department of Corrections, where she met her first husband, Alan Brown, an administrator there. Soon after the birth of their son, Mr. Brown died of cancer, leaving her to finish college and then law school, at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a single working mother.

After graduating in 1977, she became a legal counsel to the State Legislature and joined the attorney general's office. There she helped successfully defend the state against a class action suit charging that it underpaid its female employees, which brought her to the attention of former Gov. Pete Wilson. "It was regarded as a considerable legal feat and also saved the state a ton of money," he recalled.

In 1991, he hired her as legal adviser, then chose her as an agency head, state appeals court judge and eventually State Supreme Court justice. She has often said that she has been guided through the challenges of her life and work by her deep Christian faith, and she has often argued that judges should look to higher authorities than precedent or manmade laws in making decisions. In Sacramento, she and her mother attend the evangelical Cordova Church of Christ. (They were on a cruise when Ms. Brown met Dewey Parker, a jazz musician, whom she married in 1991, a fellow appellate judge said.)

Her friends describe Justice Brown as a voracious reader, amateur poet and serious intellectual, and her speeches are filled with allusions to writers including Cicero, the apostle Paul, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel Beckett, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Friedrich von Hayek and the comedian Chris Rock.

But she also has a fondness for rock 'n' roll lyrics, quoting at length from Procol Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale" in one speech and rewriting Paul Simon's song "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" as "50 Ways to Lose Your Liberty" in another.

She concluded that speech, "We've had to decide before: whether to be slaves or free."

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