Without Scalia
Justice Antonin Scalia, Michael Ramirez, Supreme Court, The Law, US Constitution

Category Archive 'Justice Antonin Scalia'
01 Mar 2016
Without ScaliaJustice Antonin Scalia, Michael Ramirez, Supreme Court, The Law, US Constitution![]() 14 Feb 2016
Antonin Gregory Scalia (1936-2016)Justice Antonin Scalia, Obituaries![]() Let’s remember him with some of his best comments. “A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.” ————————————– “[There’s] the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that; the Constitution is not a living organism; it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things…. [Proponents of the living constitution want matters to be decided] not by the people, but by the justices of the Supreme Court …. They are not looking for legal flexibility, they are looking for rigidity, whether it’s the right to abortion or the right to homosexual activity, they want that right to be embedded from coast to coast and to be unchangeable.” ————————————– “To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation. If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” 22 Jan 2013
Inauguration Fashion StatementsBarack Obama, Fashion, Inauguration, Justice Antonin Scalia![]() Justice Antonin Scalia provoked puzzlement among libs throughout the land by wearing what Gawker described as “a really weird hat” and the New York Daily News as “a beret on steroids.” The mystery was elucidated by Richmond University of Law Professor Kevin C. Walsh, who explained:
It is not unlikely that Justice Scalia was intentionally making a reference to his own support of religious liberty in connection with the Obama Administration’s attempts to force Catholic institutions to act in opposition to church teachings by mandates requiring funding of employee birth control and abortion.
———————————- Even more bizarre was the newly-inaugurated president’s appearance at Inaugural Balls incongruously wearing a white bow tie with a dinner jacket. There must surely be White House specialists in protocol available to advise the ill-informed on what is and what is not correct in matters of this kind. One correspondent of a list I read suggested that President Obama may have intentionally chosen a white tie (sometimes worn to indicate status as staff with a dinner jacket at evening events) as a kind of riposte to former President Clinton‘s unkind 2008 remark to the late Senator Kennedy dismissive of Senator Obama’s candidacy: “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.” Of course, it also might simply have been a casual expression of modernist contempt for traditional norms and customs. 27 Jun 2008
“The Constitution Means What It Says”2nd Amendment, Gun Control, Justice Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court, The Law, US Constitution![]() Randy Barnett, in today’s Wall Street Journal, relishes the results of Heller, and praises Justice Scalia’s work. I love his editorial’s title, which constitutes all by itself an absolutely devastating rejoinder to the jurisprudence of people like Justices Stevens and Breyer.
26 Jun 2008
Supreme Court Affirms Individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms2nd Amendment, District of Columbia v. Heller, Gun Control, Justice Antonin Scalia, Self Defence, Supreme Court, The Law, Washington DC![]() As predicted, Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which was naturally decided by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his capacity as decisive swing vote. On first glance, I would say that the Court’s ruling primarily represents a strong rebuke to intellectually farcical sophistry and the kinds of whimsical and creative legal analysis which divorce themselves from the Constitution’s historical background, the expressed views and intentions of the framers, commentaries on the Constitution, and the entirety of history before 1932. Justice Scalia writes at length, and with ill-concealed contempt, for efforts to eliminate the individual right to keep and bear arms by facile manipulation of the prefatory “well-regulated militia” clause, happily following the jurisprudential practice of recent decades of including a thorough and comprehensive survey of the relevant history. And he concludes: There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both the text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. But, no sooner does Justice Scalia arrive at his bold conclusion than he begins retreating from its implications and striving actively to limit its practical consequences.
In the end, the ruling merely affirms the existence of the individual right to keep and bears arms, and strikes down the District of Columbia’s ban on handgun possession in the home and its requirement that lawful firearms kept in a home be inoperable. It specifically declines to address licensing requirements (which Heller failed to challenge). Insofar as the Court affirms a right of self defense, it has done so only with respect to one’s home. The moderation of Scalia’s opinion is likely to make its power as a decision stronger rather than weaker though, and District of Columbia v. Heller signals a major reversal in the direction of Constitutional Law at the Supreme Court level. 25 Jun 2008
Reading the Tea Leaves on Heller2nd Amendment, Gun Control, Justice Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court, The Law, US Constitution, Washington DC![]() Tom Goldstein at the SCOTUS blog:
It would certainly be nice if he’s right. Your are browsing
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