Scalia: ‘I Am a Law-and-Order Guy’
We’ll admit it: We at LB headquarters tend to gobble up Justice Scalia’s commentary like rabid dogs. We’d planned to wait till Monday morning to discuss Nino’s upcoming appearance on “60 Minutes.” But with CBS putting out a teaser, we just couldn’t wait.
Scalia’s appearance on Sunday night, partly an attempt to pump up his new book, “Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges,” written with Bryan Garner, will cap a month-long roadshow that’s included appearances at UVA School of Law, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Roger Williams University law school, and the Food and Drug Law Institute.
While we haven’t seen the entire interview yet, we know Scalia, interviewed by Leslie Stahl, will hit Bush v. Gore, abortion and his relationship with liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“I am a law-and-order guy,” Scalia says. “I mean, I confess to being a social conservative, but it does not affect my views on cases. On the abortion thing, for example, if indeed I were. . . trying to impose my own views, I would not only be opposed to Roe versus Wade, I would be in favor of the opposite view, which the anti-abortion people would like to see adopted, which is to interpret the Constitution to mean that a state must prohibit abortion.”
“And you’re against that?” asks Stahl.
“Of course. There’s nothing [in the Constitution to support that view].”
Scalia, reports CBS, also denies there’s anything personal in his often stinging opinions. Stahl asks how he can be a close friend of Justice Ginsburg, his liberal bench mate, despite the fact that they disagree. “I attack ideas, I don’t attack people, and some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can’t separate the two, you got to get another day job. You don’t want to be a judge, at least not a judge on a multi-member panel.”
The Scalia book tour continues, now onward to 60 Minutes.
Can’t wait to see the interview.
Looks more like a pasta and 3 cannoli guy.
i usually disagree with him, but scalia is a character and probably my favorite justice to read. i really want to watch this thing… i wish i didn’t have a final monday morning.
“I confess to being a social conservative, but it does not affect my views on cases.”
How in the world can that be. It’s an impossibility. We’re all affected by our leanings (ideologies).
Nino’s comments about his friendship with Justice Ginsburg should be repeated every hour on the hour on cable TV, and all political blogs. During this election year, every fervent political type needs to be reminded that the Red-Blue thing should not become personal!!!
He’s not just a “Law-and-Order” guy. He’s a 30 Rock guy, too. A pudgy one, at that.
could we at least get Lattman back to select the stories? And how about parceling them out throughout the day instead of dumping them on us all at once. Is anyone watching the new guy?
Sounds like KS Trial Lawyer should stay an advocate and leave the judging to his/her betters.
Scalia isnt’ just a law and order guy - he’s a ranting conservative like any other, pushing his agenda.
KS:
Scalia’s totally impartial because he’s a “strict interpretationist”, he’s able to divine how the drafters of the Constitution would come out on every issue based on knowledge and social mores in 1787. In the 60 minutes interview, he proves this god like ability to know what a bunch of dead people would think by talking to some of them in a seance. And the coolest part is that on a lot of topics, their social mores are just like his, unpoisoned by 200 years of scientific, philosophical, behavioural and experiential knowledge.
haha Tulane 2L - I completely agree. Constitutional interpretation has nothing to do with politcal preference, it has everything to do with having a high school reading and reasoning level. When stuffy academics overthink what the constitution should mean/has meant/could be meaning, etc, then we run into problems. If people dont like what the constitution says, then petition your congressmen to amend it.
“Leave the Constitution, take the Canoli.”
Scalia is a fat, ugly, nasty, red-faced excuse for a human being. You can put all of his intellect and the substantive merits of his opinions aside, becuse the bottom line is that he is a nasty nasty human being. the way you carry yourself in such a high position is important, whether you realize it or not. The way to treat others speaks volumes, and the WAY you conduct yourself is being watched by the whole country.
So to you Mr. Scalia, I say this. Stop trying to get back at the world because you are fat, ugly and hard to look at in the morning. Do your job and stop trying to cure your self-esteem complex by being such a prick. Thanks, buddy.
“I mean, I confess to being a social conservative, but it does not affect my views on cases.”
If you idiots believe that you should try being on a jury sometime. You will see that personal bias and ideological leanings affect EVERY decision you make. You can act like they don’t matter, but they do. You know it, I know it, Scalia knows it. It’s part of someone’s personal fabric. And every true lawyer on this board knows very well, that you can construct a logical framework for almost any argument. All you need a conclusion, and you can create an argument to get you there. Any really good lawyer knows this.
Slater - thanks for passing over our school in the post, the University of Baltimore School of Law. We really appreciate that. Scalia spoke at our school yesterday afternoon, presumably part of the same speaking tour you mention above. Once again, thanks.
Even better lawyers know that there’s a difference between, on the one hand, the inevitable, unavoidable, and largely unconscious influence our “personal bias and ideological leanings” have on our decisions, and on the other, an approach to decisionmaking that consciously and deliberately embraces such biases and leanings in attempt to incorporate said biases into the substance of those decisions. And the best lawyers understand that Scalia is talking about the second kind of effect, not the first.
Justice Scalia is the best Justice that ever served on the High Court. Those who disagree with his views usually are not smart enough to even understand his writings.
To what are you referring, Godfather IV? I disagree with Scalia regularly but I have no problem with his public comportment (except perhaps the television appearances in support of his book). Should we start appointing better-looking justices because they’re far more impartial and not bitter at the world?
In the mid-90’s Justice Scalia appeared before an afternoon reception of about a hundred Texas lawyers in Washington DC, spionsored by the State Bar of Texas. They thought he was going to say a few brief remarks. He thought that he didn’t have to speak, only answer some questions from the floor. When Scalia asked for questions, no one went to the microphone. They all sat their on their hands, looking at one another to see who would dare have the temerity to ask the Great Man a single question regarding the law, the Court, his judicial philosohpy, the weather, anything. Not one lawyer rose. I guess the entire room liked him and agreed in advance with anything that he would have said anyway.So Scalia scanned the room for a few moments, and with a bit of a harrumph, he then walked off the dias and left the room! I have never seen an entire room full of Texas lawyers so silent, so meek, so completely intimidated by anyone. Can you imagine anyone getting a bunch of blowhard Texas attorneys ( or Texas big firm lawyers with D.C. offices) being rendered so completely mute? Seeing what was happening,I raised my hand immediately as he began to get up to leave, seeing as how everyone else was apparently too intimidated to make any statement at all…alas, he wisked by me too quickly, he never saw my waving, upraised arm (I was waving it like a 3rd grader—pick me! pick me!) and as far as I know, I was the only lawyer in the Cannon Office Building hearing room to even raise my hand…True Story.
Sure buddy, keep feeding us more crap. We need more transparency in government, not less. The decision to stop the recount in Florida was not in the best interest of the Public, the public deserved to know the truth, now we never will. Forget abortion, it pales in comparison to having true and free elections. Its quite obvious what his agenda was, and so far he has failed to give us a satisfactory reason for his decision. Even if the recount still ended up in Bush’s favor, we still deserved to know the truh!
The media conducted full recounts of the FL vote, & Bush still won them all… Get over it.
If you’re a “law-and-order” guy (who doesn’t allow his conservative leanings to influence his judicial opinions), you certainly shouldn’t include invective like the following in your opinions:
“[T]he law-profession culture… has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”
Nice try, Scalia.
I’m actually a Republican and agree with Scalia very often. But whether you want to believe it or not, our “personal bias and ideological leanings” affect our perception of the world (including the law), whether intentional or not.
Why can Scalia and Thomas always be counted on as “Conserative votes” and Ginsburg and Breyer as “Liberal votes”?
Etch, how many times does 2000 need to be revisited? Florida conducted a full recount. When the outcome did not change, Gore filed in state court seeking to have further recounting in cherry-picked Democrat-dominated counties, while simultaneously trying to supress absentee ballots from military personnel. Gore was not asking for a full recount of all Florida votes, just those he thought would come out in his favor. The Supreme Court put an end to this partial and highly unfair “recount.” And, although this has been flushed down the memory hole, a consortium of mainstream media outlets, including the far-from-conservative N.Y. Times, conducted a months-long review of the ballots and concluded that Bush had the majority of votes. The continued obsession with 2000 and the outright false and emotionally-charged rhetoric liberals use to this day does nothing but damage perceptions of our electoral system.
“The media conducted full recounts of the FL vote, & Bush still won them all… Get over it.”
“The Media”? What kind of silly vague argument is that? Who is “The media” and what makes their highly suspect polls & conclusions official? Give me a break
2:49—-”consciously and deliberately embraces such biases and leanings in attempt to incorporate said biases into the substance of those decisions.”
This is EXACTLY what you’re not supposed to do as a judge.
2:51. I’m talking about his abrasiveness and overall nasty disposition. The only reason we’re starting to see it now is because he’s pumping his book and he can’t help but be a total d*ckhead, even on 60 minutes. Trust me, when you watch the interview on sunday you will come away thinking “that is not a nice man.” And no, I don’t care if judges are the nicest people, but this guy is way beyond nasty. Just an egotistical, blustery, condescending loser. He’s one of those guys who is angry at the world for being fat, bald and ugly and so he takes it out on people using his intellect. The worst kind of man.
I don’t care about the results of 2000 at this point, the damage is done, BUT that doesn’t exonerate the fact that there was a “mess” at the polling stations that was eventually blamed on Flordia’s senior citizens being “senile”?? AND it happened in a state where the governer happens to be Bush’s brother! Come on, even YOU can’t deny that all this was a little more than suspicious, and should have been investigated further. But instead we swallowed it and let it go. Fine! Keep the american public asleep, its not like the resulting decision affected the politics of the entire world! *clear sarcasm*
4:15 hit the nail on the head. I doubt anyone can honestly argue that Scalia’s personal bias and prejudices do not make their way into his opinions. He’s one of the most obviously biased judges to ever walk the halls of the Supreme Court. At least Clarence Thomas is humble about his rabidly conservative views. You can be intellectually persuasive without being mean-spirited. But my guess is that Scalia just can’t help himself. He’s just a nasty pr*ck and always will be. I feel sorry for his friends and his wife. not to mention his own collegues who he takes his angry self-esteem frustrations out on.
Etch, if you’re referring to the infamous “butterfly ballots” used in a couple of the contested counties, which supposedly confused voters, please keep in mind that they were designed by the Democratic election officials of those counties and not by Jeb Bush. As for 2000 needing to be “investigated further,” it has been reviewed, revisited and analyzed ad nauseum. The problem is that the facts do not fit the liberal narrative of a “stolen election” or widespread disenfranchisement of properly qualified voters. Despite the in-depth media investigation referenced in my earlier post, no one has ever made a count of the ballots with Gore prevailing. Regardless of what one may think of his subsequent presidency, Bush won Florida and by continuing to further the myth of a stolen election and disenfranchsement, the Democrats have taken a great object lesson in the importance of every vote and turned it into a vehicle for perpetuating cyncism, feelings of powerlessness among supposedly disenfranchised groups and anger.
Scalia’s claim that he’s a strict constructionist, and that politics plays no role in his or other justices’ vote is nonsense. In Bush v. Gore, each justice voted in accordance with his or her political affiliation, with a 5-4 outcome in favor of Bush. There is a 1 in 512 chance of that outcome happening randomly. Do the math (2 to the 9th power).
Scalia is not a strict constructionist, he votes his political ideology. When strict construction or states rights arguments help, he claims that justifies his outcome. Otherwise, he’s an activist, overturning laws as unconstitutional with abandon. Bush v. Gore is but one example where he usurped federal power over states rights — remember Scalia wrote the majority opinion overturning the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling ordering a recount.
A justice’s impartiality can be mathematically assessed by how often he votes against his political ideology. By such standard, Scalia ranks at the bottom of list of impartial justices.
4:15, If you’re going to quote his Lochner, I mean Lawrence dissent, at least give it some context.
“Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means. Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its view of such matters is the best. That homosexuals have achieved some success in that enterprise is attested to by the fact that Texas is one of the few remaining States that criminalize private, consensual homosexual acts. But persuading one’s fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one’s views in absence of democratic majority will is something else. I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts–or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them–than I would forbid it to do so. What Texas has chosen to do is well within the range of traditional democratic action, and its hand should not be stayed through the invention of a brand-new “constitutional right” by a Court that is impatient of democratic change. It is indeed true that “later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” and when that happens, later generations can repeal those laws. But it is the premise of our system that those judgments are to be made by the people, and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best.”
2:08 says it well.
6:09 doesn’t get it (still).
The biggest problem with Scalia is that he is strictly a “Law and Order” guy. He has forgotten that the purpose of law, in our nation, is to promote justice and that the Supreme Court of the United States of America is a court of law and equity. He seems to care nothing for equity as is illustrated in his positions on Lawrence vs. Texas in which he made correct legal argument but missed the underlying concept of fairness and justice (equity); and in his position on Bush vs. Gore where the equitable position would be that when a margin of victory is smaller than the margin of error of a vote count, the thing to do is recount the vote. Scalia has lost sight of plain truth that law should serve justice and that slavish adherence to law without the balance of equity and the goal of justice results in tyranny.
When FL Bailey spoke at my brother’s graduation from law school,he made a remark that has stuck to me for years -”you are not going out to find justice. You are going out to practice Law.”
Those who do not understand Scalia’s positions simply are not smart enough to understand them. If they did, they would join in praising the greatest justice of our generation.
1:00am. We understand Scalia’s decisions completely, which is why we can see the transparent attempt to inject his socially conservative biases into his opinions by cloaking them in legal rhetoric and intellectually dishonest logic. We are much much smarter than you. We know exactly what Scalia is doing. Despite his lies, he is actually one of the most activist judges ever. His activism is covertly concealed, however, in his rhetoric and his “strict constructonist” mantra. If you think about it, you can make a plausible argument that anything not written exactly word for word in the Constitution is not part of it. Scalia picks and chooses which things he wants to import into the language and which things he doesn’t. He is a very very clever and conniving guy, I’ll give him that. But he is the most transparently biased judge ever to sit on the Supreme Court. That will be his legacy, and we will remember him for his nasty demeanor, his giant ego (which masks self-esteem problems), his disgustingly bad looks, and his unbridled extremism on the bench.
Judge Scalia, I hope you read this blog. I really hope you know how nasty and miserable you have become. I want you to see how you have become the most hated judge in Supreme Court history. I will never buy your book as long as I live and I truly hope your miserable life is full of pain and suffering.
I just watched excerpts of the 60 minutes interview and Scalia has to be one of the least charming persons I’ve ever seen on tape. Not only is he so fat that you can actually see his gut coming out of his suit on TV, but his scrunchy little red and bald headed face looks like this little pug I saw at the dog park the other day. Not kidding. this guy is disgusting, both inside and out. seriously. It’s really funny that he thinks going on TV is going to help his reputation. It’s one of the worst interviews I’ve ever seen. judge for yourself, people, but hard to find anything likeable in that fat POS. get over it? f*ck you. tell that to the 4000 troops that you killed by allwoing Bush to get elected unfairly.
Hey look, I am just a delivery person, I deliver bread. But I read this blog once a week. Is it just me or does it seem the judges in the Supreme Court are constantly talking about money in some way, shape or form? A book tour now! Wow, time to upgrade his $350K plus home. Don\’t judge that book by the cover.
I think the only reason people are insulting Scalia is b/c he does not think the Constitution requires baby killing. If he was in favor of baby killing, then most of the people on this thread would love him.
Now imagine if he was born 20 years earlier, and in Germany.
http://www.ica-d.de/srv/chr/pic/p0558c.jpg
This blog id getting boring (again). Scalia blah blah, strict constructionist blah blah, Florida recount blah blah, Al Gore blah blah…
Scalia fulfilled the expectations of those who appointed him in Bush v. Gore. He put old man Bush’s boy in the Whitehouse. He knows what that means. If he had any shame he would hang his head now as he surveys the national and international wreckage from his choice.
I’ve heard him lecture at my law school. He’s very smart, very spoiled, very Catholic and cock-sure that he is always right.
To me he looks like Emril. I expect him to whip up a mean lasagna and find his prose somewhat entertaining. Otherwise he strikes me as a self-serving, old fashioned thinker who wants to control everyone in the country according to his personal bias and claim that the framers of the Constitution agree with HIM!
Yawn!
Scott - you are so funny!
Funny, funny, funny!
Some individuals in this country believe in a right of privacy for reproductive decisions. 85% of the people belive in this right.
Social conservatives believe that no one should be free to choose to terminate a pregnancy except them, if they get in a scrape.
You sound like a hypocrite to me.
lol. It’s hilarious to see someone try to argue that he’s smart enough to understand complex legal theories, and then go ahead and get the very basics of those theories wrong.
“We understand Scalia’s decisions completely, which is why we can see the transparent attempt to inject his socially conservative biases into his opinions by cloaking them in legal rhetoric and intellectually dishonest logic. We are much much smarter than you. We know exactly what Scalia is doing.”
Here’s more on what Scalia said:
http://resipsablog.com/2008/04/27/scalias-interview-on-60-minutes/
In the fall of 2001 a group of media companies consisting of the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The St. Petersburg Times, The Miami Herald, and the Tribune Company (owner of The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers) obtained, pursuant to a freedom of information act request, the Florida ballots from the 2000 Presidential election and conducted an exhaustive recount over a period of weeks. The results were released on November 12. The findings were that (i) in a Florida-wide recount that included overvotes (ballots where a candidate’s name was checked and then also written in on the line provided)Gore would have won under any scenario (varying standards employed by individual counties, uniform standard that didn’t include hanging chads, uniform standard that did include hanging chads, etc.)and that (ii) if a recount were only conducted in the counties of Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Volusa, Bush would have won under any scenario. When the Florida judge overseeing the recount was asked by one of the newspapers he implied had the Supreme Court not intervened he would have ordered a state-wide recount that included overvotes. Scalia and Renquist pride themselves on being strict constructionalists and therefore advocates of states’ rights. I have read the decision and can still not understand why in this one instance both judges felt the need to interfere with a Florida court’s interpretation of a Florida statute.
