Word: scalia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Along with his philosophy of judicial restraint, Scalia boasts a resume bursting with brilliance (valedictorian at Georgetown, a Law Review editor at Harvard, esteemed law professor at the University of Chicago) and a reputation for gregariousness and charm. So in 1986 the Reagan Administration believed that the 50-year-old circuit court of appeals judge was the perfect candidate to lead a new conservative majority on the high court into the 21st century. That he was an Italian-American father of nine whose appointment would please an ethnic constituency was a bonus. At the time, Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone...
...term that ends this month marks Scalia's 10th year on the Supreme Court. He has tirelessly argued that case-by-case, seat-of-the-pants jurisprudence turns judges into illicit legislators who substitute their policy preferences for those of the people's democratically elected officials. Last week, for example, he refused to join the rest of the court in holding that the tax-supported, men-only Virginia Military Institute violated women's right to equal protection of the laws. A democratic system, Scalia wrote, "is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process...
Judges--not all of whom have the wisdom of Solomon--should apply general, unvarying rules to every case, Scalia says. And the Constitution, he maintains, consists of just such rules. Where others see highly abstract terms, intentionally written to evolve with the nation they're meant to govern, Scalia--who describes himself as a textualist and originalist--sees a text of fixed and narrow meaning: in the Bill of Rights, "liberty" cannot comprise the privacy and personal autonomy to choose to have an abortion or to engage in homosexual relations because it did not in 1791. The 14th Amendment...
...hasn't worked out that way. When fellow Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy wrote, for the 6-to-3 majority in Romer v. Evans in May, that a state constitutional amendment denying legal redress for discrimination based on homosexuality violated the equal-protection clause, Scalia wrote a withering dissent. He scoffed at the majority opinion's "grim, disapproving hints that Coloradans have been guilty of animus or animosity toward homosexuality, as though that has been established as un-American" and derided Kennedy's reasoning as "preposterous" and "comical," then dismissed the holding as "terminal silliness...
Such insulting language has become Scalia's signature style. It does not win friends or influence jurists--except perhaps to move them off the fence into alignment against him. Georgetown University law professor Mark Tushnet, who has studied the personal papers of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, says Scalia "annoyed everybody at one time or another...They'd get over it and say, 'That's just how Nino is,' and then he'd do something else. It has to have left some residue of unwillingness to accommodate...