While the legal profession debates the propriety of his decision to participate in the educational sessions for conservative new members of Congress, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia is also causing a stir over his public statement that the 14th Amendment does not prohibit discrimination against women or gays.
Scalia’s statement came in an interview with California Lawyer magazine. Scalia stated “You know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly, the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.”
Once again, this statement is not a violation of judicial ethics but rather a violation of a core principle of judicial self-restraint. In the past, justices avoided public appearances beyond occasional law school commencements and ceremonial appearances. That was before the advent of the celebrity justice where members increasingly appear in high profile events. I take a highly conservative view of such appearances. I believe it undermines the integrity of the court for justices to be holding forth on their personal views in interviews and conferences. They are given one of nine unique positions that require a degree personal discipline in public appearance and, yes, insularity. As noted in this column, I admired John Paul Stevens for his practice of having his opinions speak for themselves. Scalia has helped inspire a new model of the celebrity justice that appears to appeal to many of his colleagues. These interviews and speeches tend to be self-aggrandizing exercises and not only do not do justice to the Court but to Scalia himself. He is certainly not alone in yielding to the temptation to appear in public. Both liberal and conservative justices have increasingly made controversial appearances.
Scalia’s views on gender discrimination are well-known. However, such arguments should be precedent not personality driven. Scalia is rightfully viewed as an intellectual leader of the conservative wing of the Court. If there is anyone who could allow his opinions to speak well for himself, it is Justice Scalia. He clearly enjoys exchanges with students and lawyers. He is also one of the most entertaining and dynamic members of the Court. I truly like that about him. However, this is a job that requires the small sacrifice in one’s public persona. Scalia’s legacy would be better served with less of the justice in the public arena.
Source: Politics Daily
Jonathan Turley
Otteray Scribe:
Yes!
“…the book cannot be wrong” is plausibly the upper limit of my sarcastic humour attainment to date. Or, am I joking now?
The most definitive, recent source for me is the movie, Dogma. Being Dogma, I cannot question it. In the movie, Dogma, is the dogma that humanity is a joke, who am I to question Dogma?
It is improper to question precedent in a field not within one’s established professional competence. My dad took astronomy as one of his college minors, I took not one astronomy course while at Carleton, so I am unqualified to question an expert in a field in which I am not qualified.
What right would I have to question an qualified expert such as Dr. Comstock, who was obviously competent in astronomy. Furthermore, Comstock does not mention in his book any way where new planets can be created, so his list has to be complete.
It is well known that Wikipedia, because people like me can edit it, is not an authoritative source. So, in the interest of scientific integrity, I needs be must go with a qualified expert and not with a source which has no clearly documented provenance.
Being skeptical, I decided to check out that “f = m*a” thing. Nowhere to be found in Comstock, (op.cit.) so that equation has to be fake. I read every page in the book to the end of the very last page, no. 295.
I did learn something, though. The moon is inhabited, from page 259, “The earth, seen by the inhabitants of the moon, exhibits the same phases that the moon does to us, but in contrary order.” It is absolutely certain that there are inhabitants on the moon, else how could the moon’s inhabitants see the earth?
I just love learning new scientific facts.
I am so grateful that I never heard of skepticism.
BBB,
I’ve invited you to explain to me why the First Amendment can have exceptions but a hypothetical Constitutional ban on legislated gender based discrimination can’t. Please do. I’m honestly curious as to what you think the distinction is.
That’s a much more effective way of conversing than saying “well you just don’t get it.”
I have always found Scalia to be a sexist pig; and, he continues to prove me right. I have no respect for him or the present Supreme Court. Justices like those on the Court presently seem to work easily at earning my disrespect. I also think they have dishonored the Supreme Court.
J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E. sez: “I have my book, and the book cannot be wrong.
**************************************
Surely sir, you jest. If you truly believe that, I hate to burst your bubble. Yes, books often are wrong. No matter how good the author, no matter how diligent the editor, books have errors in them. Some errors are deliberate, as we have seen in the current disputes over textbooks in Texas. The Commonwealth of Virgina is looking into awful factual errors in some of their school books.
In addition to errors in books, there is the transition from the page to the eye and brain as well, an area fraught with the opportunity for errors of commission and omission, not to mention outright forgetting. As has been pointed out to you repeatedly, what you think you might know and what is factually true is not always the same.
To those who know I am wrong, a fact I do not dispute:
I took that American Government class at Triton College, River Grove, Illinois, the local community college for Oak Park, where I then lived.
I was working toward a M.Ed. degree as a way to subvert the apparent intent of the then-head of bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Illinois standards for teacher certification were changed while I was having my second major surgery event to delay my dying from cancer secondary to familial adenomatous polyposis. I needed an American Government class to continue toward the M.Ed. thing, but the head of bioengineering was replaced and the replacement understood and supported what I was doing in bioengineering. After I got back into BioE, that head left and was replaced by someone else who lacked the grand vision of bioengineering my advisor and I shared.
Triton had many students who were hoping to get a job and not an education, yet had many superb professors. The American Government professor used a form of classroom Jeopardy as a way to get some of his students to pay attention, and he had a beautiful repertoire of strategies, including wake-up analogies such as court as church, which got classroom discussions going with many in the class who would otherwise have merely drifted through the term.
There is a tad of a concern which terrifies me to mention, based on some prior misunderstandings of my professional engineering concerns. In general, members of the bar are not expected to understand the way stress concentrators work as tensors in the propagation of cracks in brittle materials, and that is just fine with me.
Alas, by merely being alive and going about the routine activities of my daily life, I am expected to obey laws which I find contradict other laws I expected to obey even though obeying one such law is inextricably a violation of the other. This, as my father-in-law, Allen J. Hamilton, P.E. independently brought to my attention, creates severe intrinsic-conflict difficulties from time to time for civil engineers such as he was.
If people who work professionally in making and enforcing societal laws were the only people expected to obey their laws, and if only engineers were expected to obey their engineering laws, there would be no conflict between such professional disciplines.
Alas, engineers are required to obey both engineering laws and social laws, even when engineering laws are incompatible with social laws, whereas attorneys, legislators, and judges have no need to heed any engineering or scientific law not already included within their social laws.
Were I actually a piece of valuable fertilizer, or filled with same, I might suggest a science book for you to read, one in my personal library. For those not versed in the “hard sciences,” this may be an easy book for starting to learn.
When I come upon someone who is interested in learning about science, but whose understanding of neurobiophysics is at the stage of the twelfth century, I have just the book to recommend. I can tell you all what it is, you, like me, will have to find your own copy to read. The title page of said book:
A System of Natural Philosophy in Which the Principles of Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Acoustics, Optics, Astronomy, Electricity, and Magnetism are Familiarly Explained, and Illustrated by More Than Two Hundred Engravings, To Which Are Added, Questions For the Examination of the Pupils Designed For the Use of Schools and Academies. Thirty-First Edition. By H. L. Comstock, M.D., Mem. Con. M.S.; Hon. Mem.R. I. M. S.; Author of Noted to Conv. on Chemistry, Auth. of Gram. Chem., of Elem. Mineralogy; of Na. Hist of Quadr. and Birds, &c. New York: Published by Robinson, Pratt, & Co. No 259 Pearl Street; and Sold By the Principal Booksellers Throughout the United States. 1836.
I am inclined to recommend this book because I have read it more than once, and I surmise that the leap from a twelfth-century hard science understanding to about the end of the first third of the nineteenth century may be a manageable effort.
This book has a complete listing of the planets on page 203, the list, from closest to the Sun to farthest from it, in outward sequence, is, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Jupiter, Saturn, and Herschel.
I just checked Wikipedia, and I will need to edit the page named “Planets.” There are two names not in my Natural Philosophy book, which must be errors, and there are four other planets missing. No wonder Wikipedia is not a source that can be trusted. I have my book, and the book cannot be wrong.
Llamas have played a huge part in the cinema world, BBB. Moose too.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SII-jhEd-a0&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Maybe they weren’t unicorns. Maybe they were llamas wearing hats.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZUPCB9533Y&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Unicorns and to for too, two.
That must be some good stuff there, BBB.
SB too comfortable.
They’re kicking in!
Blouise,
Just because he may have ingested some of my non-prescription meds, that doesn’t mean I share. It just means I may have been to “comfortable” to stop him. 🙂
BBB,
So you share … good to know 🙂
Brian,
If you see a unicorn in the garden, you must have taken my non-prescription meds by mistake. 🙂
Brian,
“I find I need to be very timid in sharing the sort of humour my American Government professor used in his class to get students of lower will-to-effort to learn.”
So now he was joking about ecclesiastical courts?
Nope. Not buying it.
And although you may view language differently because of your condition, it doesn’t negate that language operates off the concept of agreed upon meaning – either culturally or professionally defined. As words are not the objects or actions they represent, the meaning is symbolic, but it is still meaning. Otherwise all of language would simply be gibberish. Which in some cases, it still can be when words are used out of context and/or contrary to their meaning.
I find I need to be very timid in sharing the sort of humour my American Government professor used in his class to get students of lower will-to-effort to learn. The last time I set out to share humor, albeit humourlessly, it imploded explosively. Yikes!
So, I now deteriorate further.
Abridgment, per Black’s 6th through 10th appears to me to be about reduction in amount, so, as the amount of free speech, if not abridged, is not numerically stated, I shall take the constitutional amount of free speech to be 0.000 (repeating decimal).
That solves the abridgment problem. Abridgment obviously, using its plain meaning, is an absolute value function. There is no free speech less than zero. The constitution does not permit free speech. Human brain biology also does not permit free speech, because of the electrochemistry of neurons and synapses, so the powers of free speech reserved to the public are also non-existent.
All these years, finally I understand the plain meaning of plain meaning. It is synonymous with nullity.
Meds… Where are my meds? Is that a unicorn in the garden?
Bob Esq.,
I agree with you about incorporation.
Bob Esq.,
Are you saying that the Twenty-Fifth Section of the Judiciary Act was/is unconstitutional?
Lord Scalia: “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.’
Nobody ever voted for judicial review.
Nobody ever voted for the incorporation doctrine.
Scalia; intellectually dishonest?
Never.
Gyges,
I think the problem in our communication is that you don’t understand “heightened scutiny” and “legitimate public interest”. I made sure to point them out to rafflaw in an earlier comment.
I don’t mean to be dismissive, but I don’t know what more you want.
BBB,
I’m not arguing point three. I’m the one who brought it up after all.
You’ve done diddly squat to reconcile points 2 and 3. You built your argument on something that you then admitted wasn’t the case.
If you want to be intellectually honest you’ve either got to change your argument, show why the Constitution can make exceptions for legitimate government interests on the in one instance and not the other, or admit that point 1 and 2 aren’t as solid of proof as you thought.
I’m open to any of the three.
Gyges,
“[T]he main purpose of such constitutional provisions is ‘to prevent all such previous restraints upon publications as had been practised by other governments,’ and they do not prevent the subsequent punishment of such as may be deemed contrary to the public welfare.”
PATTERSON v. COLORADO (1907)