Word: scalias
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...absence of a clear constitutional imperative, however, he is willing to grant broad powers to the majority and demonstrates, as George Kannar, a law professor who has written extensively on Scalia, has noted, "an affection for established norms, and for 'normalcy' in general, extending to the most private part of private life." Therefore it was not surprising when, dissenting from the court's holding last month that psychotherapists should have a privilege against disclosing their clients' confidences in court proceedings, Scalia wrote, "Ask the average citizen: Would your mental health be more significantly impaired by preventing you from seeing...
...highly contentious issue of affirmative action, however, Scalia has been accused of abandoning both his fidelity to original intent and his habitual deference to the legislature. He argues that the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause forbids virtually any racial classifications in law despite the fact that the very Congress that passed the 14th Amendment went on to pass laws using just such classifications...
...Scalia's objections to set asides and preferential treatment run deep. "My father came to this country when he was a teenager," he once wrote. "Not only had he never profited from the sweat of any black man's brow, I don't think he had ever seen a black man." The only child of an Italian-immigrant father who became a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College and of an Italian-American mother who taught public school, Scalia remains determinedly anti-elitist--he dines in a downtown pizza joint and keeps his name listed in the phone book...
...other "losers" in life, the poor, Scalia appears less sympathetic, consistently voting against claimants to government aid. Because welfare comes without the efforts at moral uplift that accompanied religious charity, he told an audience in May, "the result is often the elimination of poverty without the elimination of the vices that produce the poverty...
Though he sometimes sounds like a champion of the status quo, with all its inequities, Scalia points out that it is not the court's job to decide what is right, only what is constitutional. When his fellow Justices cast themselves as moral arbiters, as he insisted they did in the V.M.I. case, their enterprise, he wrote, "is not the interpretation of a Constitution, but the creation of one." The one we have suits Scalia just fine...