Sunday, May 03, 2009

What Makes Justice Scalia A Really Bad Judge

What Makes Justice Scalia A Really Bad Judge “This year, after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made public comments that seemingly may have questioned the need for more protection of private information, Reidenberg assigned the same project. Except this time Scalia was the subject, the prof explains to the ABA Journal in a telephone interview.

His class turned in a 15-page dossier that included not only Scalia's home address, home phone number and home value, but his food and movie preferences, his wife's personal e-mail address and photos of his grandchildren, reports Above the Law.

And, as Scalia himself made clear in a statement to Above the Law, he isn't happy about the invasion of his privacy:”

But, like other bad jurists, Scalia is unwilling to admit to a constitutional right of privacy because it doesn't mention the word. The philosophy of strict constructionism blinds him to the implication forcefully set out in the fourth and fifth amendments that make no rational sense without the concept of privacy. Also, the same philosophy requires him to ignore the fact that the constitution set forth rules regulating slavery, and how slaves were to be counted for purpose of congressional representation, without ever using the words slave or slavery.

Slaves and slavery existed. The constitution regulated them by implication. Yet Justice Scalia can't admitthat implication makes privacy a constitutional right. The philosophy that sees the law as something divorced from human practice and behavior probably explains some pof the bizarre opinions he's written as much as his briliant ones. Unfortunately, brilliant philosophy cab give you phlogiston instead of thermodynamics, epicycles instead of orbits, wonderful explication of things that never were, and a rage to with brilliant wit disprove and therefor silence simple self-evident truths.

The brilliantly wrong are the worst people possible to place in positionss of authority. The brilliant, bold but badly mistaken Justice Scalia is in position for life.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/googling_justic.html