I usually disagreed with Scalia, but I have tons of respect for the man. He's always struck me as one of the best examples of the idea that two intelligent, educated people with reasonable minds may legitimately come to different conclusions about the same set of facts.
I also found when reading transcripts of oral arguments that Scalia was really terrifically funny pretty often.
Once, I was doing some computer repair work for an attorney who was interviewing Scalia extensively for a book about Supreme Court oral arguments. It was late in the day, and all the other staff were gone.
The phone rang, and the attorney asked me if I would answer it since I was close, and tell whoever it was that he was busy. I picked it up and the voice on the other end said, "let me speak to x." I said he wasn't in. The voice says, "I know he's in. Let me speak to him please." I tried to deflect again, and he finally says, "This is Justice Scalia. I guarantee you your boss wants to talk to me."
Without thinking I piped up and said, "Oh, Justice Scalia! You won't believe who just walked in the door! Just a second."
Apparently Scalia thought that was hilarious and told the guy to pay me extra for popping off to a Supreme Court justice like that.
Edit: as a quick sidenote, I'd encourage everyone to actually read the oral arguments and the full opinions for important cases as they come up. The media is absolutely terrible about over simplifying or just straight up not getting the issues correct.
You will find that there is a hell of a lot of thought that goes into opinions, and there is much less predetermined ideology than the way these things often get painted.
>>> I usually disagreed with Scalia, but I have tons of respect for the man. He's always struck me as one of the best examples of the idea that two intelligent, educated people with reasonable minds may legitimately come to different conclusions about the same set of facts.
I didn't have much respect for the man or the justice. As a justice, his interpretations were always based on a selectively warped view of history. As a man, he issued a steady stream of insults against all sorts of people. Specifically, he said of lawyers like me (the not-harvard crowd) "You cannot make a purse out of a sow's ear". And he regularly talked down to anyone he though not ivy enough to share the room. That sort of disrespect isn't forgotten. Nobody should ever take joy in the death of another, but I will not miss his voice on the court.
This comment referred specifically to getting a clerkship, and he also admits one of his favorite clerks went to Ohio State.
In general it seems, he had a lot of bark, but no real malice, otherwise why would he be good friends with other justices, including of all people Breyer and Ginsburg?
> Specifically, he said of lawyers like me (the not-harvard crowd) "You cannot make a purse out of a sow's ear".
According to the NYT source, he actually said, "you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse", referring to the Harvard crowd as silk purses but not to non-Harvard lawyers as sow's ears. He seems to be referring to his disdain for the quality of the education at the most selective law schools while complementing their qualifications of their students.
It's an expression he has used more than once. I first heard it when a law student asked him whether she should bother applying for a clerkship given she hadn't gone to harvard. In that instance the sows ear was the asking law student.
> I first heard it when a law student asked him whether she should bother applying for a clerkship given she hadn't gone to harvard. In that instance the sows ear was the asking law student.
That's a very mean thing to have said about her and her whole class. I'm sorry you experienced that.
No. I heard it in person during my first year of law school, which would have been long before 2009. The guy talked constantly, which isn't surprising given the job. Not every word appeared in NYT articles shortly thereafter.
I used to feel like that - that Justice Scalia was an thoughtful, intellectually honest justice that I profoundly disagreed with simply because I found his foundational principles alien and wrong.
Then came Eldred v. Ashcroft. Larry Lessig, argued the case before the Supreme Court. In his retrospective on the case [1], Lessig describes how he built his argument on the Lopez/Morrison line of decisions which said that Congress's enumerated powers had to be interpeted so that they are structurally limited. In Lopez/Morrison, Scalia agreed with the argument that Congress can't regulate whatever they want simply by declaring it to be related to interstate commerce. Lessig's argument in Eldred was that a similar structural limit should apply to the copyright power: Congress shouldn't be able to establish effectively unlimited copyright "on the installment plan".
I want to be clear what I am claiming here. I'm not saying Scalia was intellectually dishonest because Lessig lost. I'm claiming it because (as described in the retrospective) the Court didn't even address his core argument. Even if Ginsburg didn't want to include it in her majority opinion (perhaps because she didn't agree with the Lopez/Morrison decisions), Scalia could have explained why Eldred was different in a concurrence, but he didn't. That's where I see the intellectual dishonesty.
This isn't really directed at you, but it seems like a good place to address the crowd.
I didn't say the man was a saint or that he was always perfectly intellectually honest all the time. No one is.
But I think was a lot more of those things than he often got credit for. Some of you seem to forget that people who have different opinions than you are also people. And as such, they have the right to try to get those opinions represented. Scalia's attitude towards torture was repulsive in my opinion. But he represents the attitudes of a very large number of real people.
It's not like he's some kind of singular monster or something.
As for saying crass things, giving people shit when maybe he shouldn't have, well, we've all done that too.
I figure if there's one day you can cut a guy a little slack, it's the day he dies. Sheesh, if you can't find one tiny little positive thing to say about the man, I suggest that you aren't even trying. It's not like the man was pure evil.
I further suggest that you say nothing at all if you honestly can't think of anything good about him.
The vitriol in much of this thread is utterly tasteless and shameful.
“This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power.”
“...the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. [...] Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death.”
If you want to attack a person based on his professional life, you are free to do that. But I don't think that's appropriate here. Maybe take it to Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or something?
I'm not demanding that people shut up for all eternity and never criticize the opinions Scalia wrote. In this context, I think the Greenwald quote is a strawman. I've already made it clear that I disagreed with Scalia on many points.
But attacking a person on the day that he died is tasteless no matter what you think of him or her.
And I don't think there's really much to attack Justice Scalia on in terms of his personal life anyway. He was a close personal friend of the Notorious RBG, a devoted husband to one wife, Maureen, and father of 9 children.
Is that propagandistic whitewashing? No. It is not. Some people value it when politicians and judges live the life they assert publicly is the best possible life.
I don't want that life and don't agree that it's the best. But the man put his life where his mouth was.
The idea that a judge, or any Justice is just the sum of their soundbites regarding only the most highly media-ized opinions is truly preposterous.
Yes, I think Scalia came down on the wrong side of Citizens United, and also Obergefell. And there are others that I could cite where I disagree with him.
But there are many I could agree with, like Smith, where he strongly opined that the law needed a clearer use of plain language, and in fact, Scalia was one of the first on the Court to advocate plain English in legislation, contracts, and Court briefs.
I've edited hundreds of hours of video interviews with the Court on the topic of plain English in the realms, and it is clear to me that Scalia was the driving force that literally changed the Court's opinions on acceptable prose.
His influence on the language of the Court alone should win him a medal of some sort. Because this is good for everyone, not just partisans who happened to appeal to his politics.
Legal scholars and attorneys all over the country will be parsing and analyzing his jurisprudence for decades to come. There is no danger that people are going to stop thinking about the ways in which he was right or wrong.
Suggesting that people who ask to give it a day, or parse the decisions instead of the man is not misguided or dangerous. Greenwald is way off base here.
What I'm suggesting is that, like many of us, Justice Scalia was a man acting in good faith, serving his country at one of the highest levels. Regardless of how much you agree or disagree with his decisions, he was a human being and deserves a little respect.
And this is coming from someone who disagreed with him often.
The man was a human being. Perhaps wrong sometimes. Perhaps right sometimes. He does not deserve personal vitriol on the day of his death. Unless he turns out to be Hitler in disguise, I'm not sure he deserves personal attacks at all.
With respect, this appears to me a content-free reply. Greenwald is making a serious argument in the article I quoted from. Are you being dismissive of the argument or (as it would appear) the source, the author. If the latter, maybe you can more fully explain why and also why dismissing the source dismisses the argument.
The key distinction is between criticizing Scalia's judgements, which many if not most of us would, and denouncing him a human being. The latter is a problem on HN because it rapidly degrades the discourse below the level we hope for.
I also think that a little self-observation is enough to reveal (a) the rather ugly motives behind that mechanism, and (b) how we would each consider it unfair in our own case.
> And as such, they have the right to try to get those opinions represented.
At best, Scalia represented the opinions of an opinionated and influential but not truly representative minority of the population.
Now - there's nothing in the constitution that says explicitly that the Supreme Court should be a representative body.
But the political reality is that judges aren't picked for the SC because they're the best legal minds of their generation - they're chosen for their legal minds and for their politics.
IMO, in a representative democracy, the political values of the judiciary and especially of the SC should be broadly similar to those of the population.
Did Scalia bring the SC closer to the values of the median population, or did he move it away from the median?
This seems to make sense but it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to drag society forward when society's inertia is at odds with the Constitution. For example, 90% of people didn't support interracial marriage when the Supreme Court legalised it. If the bench's political values were the same as the general population, that would never have happened.
It was closer to 80%, and on a question of disapproval of[1], not illegality. I may disapprove of your misquoting stats, but that doesn't mean I want you to go to jail for it. Also the majority of population lived in a state where interracial marriage was legal since before 1940, and by 1967 the only states that have miscegenation laws were the ones apt to fly Dixie. It was not so much about dragging against inertia, unless by inertia you mean stalemate—the South would never have repealed those laws.
My apologies, I misread the the Gallup graph because the one I saw didn't have 1968 marked. Anyhow, my point stands. It would not have been legalised if the bench voted like the general population did.
No, that doesn't follow at all. Loving was a criminal case. The poll is about "disapproval". Again, I disapprove of your lack of logic at this small hour, but I would never want you to go to jail over it ;-)
> This seems to make sense but it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to drag society forward when society's inertia is at odds with the Constitution.
I don't see where it says that in Article III of the Constitution. Can you point it out to me?
I didn't say the court has a need or obligation to representative. I said that there are real people who believe the same things Scalia did.
Those people, minority or not, have as much of a right to try to elect people who are like them and and gain support for what they think is right as you do.
Many of the most important people in my life have been those I profoundly disagree with on major issues, but who are able to articulate their positions honestly and clearly, and who are able to address criticisms and alternative opinions well. It's not always enjoyable to face strong and well-argued criticism, but it's what helps me make my own ideas stronger.
Scalia was one of those who, whether I agreed or disagreed, I always learned from when I read his arguments.
> You will find that there is a hell of a lot of thought that goes into opinions, and there is much less predetermined ideology than the way these things often get painted.
Yeah, retconning to twist everything that seeks to disturb one's bigoted and repressive worldview does take an extraordinary amount of thought, credit where it is due. I encourage everyone to not just read the opinions, but to be vigilant of this when doing so.
The true crime of this is that it leads reasonable people like yourself to the belief that his deplorable behavior is merely a case of "reasonable people can disagree intelligently".
Make no mistake, the outcome is predetermined based on his ideology. Reading individual opinions in isolation may tempt you to believe otherwise, but consulting his record over the long term will make it pretty clear.
> I encourage everyone to not just read the opinions, but to be vigilante of this when doing so.
Vigilantism, particularly against judges and justices for written opinions, is not the way to deal with laws and interpretations you find unjust. We must not fight the unjust with injustice.
I think it was meant "vigilant" in the Latin sense, ie.: watchful, attentive. Otherwise, the statement ("vigilant of") doesn't seem to make much sense.
Ahh, I see. I live in a non-English speaking country, and I'm very used to correspondence where the author has copy-pasted a correctly spelled word from a dictionary, but has used very non-standard grammar in constructing the sentence. I guess that's why I read it as a grammatical mistake rather than a spelling mistake.
Going on a tangent here, that's an interesting claim, and I think I disagree. I posit that vigilantism is merely an alternative vehicle to the legal system, and only outcomes can be just or unjust.
Let us not fool ourselves into thinking that the legal outcome is necessarily the just outcome.
That's funny considering he argued the exact opposite, that mere moral disagreement was sufficient reason to justify a community criminalizing said deviant behavior.
Calling the man names and suggesting it's a good thing that he's dead, is far more charitable than his worldview on morality.
The outcomes are pre-determined. Then they have to work backwards to justify them. It is extremely obvious when you read e.g. the Dred Scott or Korematsu decisions that were decided a long time ago, but it is still very obvious when you read recent decisions like Obergefell or Citizens United.
I also found when reading transcripts of oral arguments that Scalia was really terrifically funny pretty often.
Once, I was doing some computer repair work for an attorney who was interviewing Scalia extensively for a book about Supreme Court oral arguments. It was late in the day, and all the other staff were gone.
The phone rang, and the attorney asked me if I would answer it since I was close, and tell whoever it was that he was busy. I picked it up and the voice on the other end said, "let me speak to x." I said he wasn't in. The voice says, "I know he's in. Let me speak to him please." I tried to deflect again, and he finally says, "This is Justice Scalia. I guarantee you your boss wants to talk to me."
Without thinking I piped up and said, "Oh, Justice Scalia! You won't believe who just walked in the door! Just a second."
Apparently Scalia thought that was hilarious and told the guy to pay me extra for popping off to a Supreme Court justice like that.
Edit: as a quick sidenote, I'd encourage everyone to actually read the oral arguments and the full opinions for important cases as they come up. The media is absolutely terrible about over simplifying or just straight up not getting the issues correct.
You will find that there is a hell of a lot of thought that goes into opinions, and there is much less predetermined ideology than the way these things often get painted.