U. S. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah outlined his principles for what makes a good judge during a lecture Monday at Canisius College as part of its Frank G. Raichle Lecture Series on Law in American Society.

It was a timely topic for the most senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee as Hatch and the committee prepare to review President Obama’s latest batch of federal judicial appointments. In addition, Hatch, who has been through 12 confirmation proceedings for nominees to the U. S. Supreme Court, could be looking at his 13th later this year.

“I’m going to talk about what [Chief] Justice [John] Roberts said in terms of judges being umpires, instead of pitchers and batters. Their job is to umpire, not interfere with the game,” Hatch told reporters Monday, before addressing a crowd of about 250 inside the Montante Cultural Center.

The six-term senator said the more liberal of Obama’s appointees would, naturally, receive the most scrutiny from Senate Republicans.

For instance, Hatch said, University of California, Berkley, Law School “Professor Goodwin Liu will be a controversial nominee because of some of his pronouncements and some of his approaches to the law, which appear to be pretty liberal.”

“It’s OK to be liberal and be a judge. Where it’s not OK is where you start to put your own policy preferences into law rather than abide by the written law,” Hatch added.

Liu has been nominated for the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Hatch called the recent passage of Obama’s health care bill a massive expansion of government. “Government should be limited. In order to have a limited government you have to have laws that provide for limitations on government. When government becomes too [allencompassing] it really does do away with liberty,” he said.

“The health care bill affects one-sixth of the American economy. It is a horrendous piece of legislation,” Hatch continued. “So there is a lot of reason to criticize the health care bill. It’s a massive, massive move toward the Europeanization of America. That’s what I call it, moving more and more into government.”

He contrasted the health care bill with the Child Health Insurance Program bill he crafted that offered states block grants to fund their own individual programs, an approach that he said fostered creativity and avoided what he called a huge federal bureaucracy.

“Most of the states made it work very, very well. Some did not. New York was one of them . . . but New York could pick and choose from the other states the various ways of handling that to make it better,” Hatch said.