Caustic, Sarcastic And Smart: Antonin Scalia In His Own Words

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had a lot to say, and write, before his death Saturday at age 79.

His words were often caustic, and he has been called — with the backing of a fairly impressive study — the most sarcastic justice in Supreme Court history.

Erwin Chemerinsky, now dean of the University of California, is quoted in an excellent Washington Post article:

In dissenting opinions, Justice Scalia describes the majority’s approaches as “nothing short of ludicrous” and “beyond the absurd,” “entirely irrational,” and not “pass[ing] the most gullible scrutiny.” He has declared that a majority opinion is “nothing short of preposterous” and “has no foundation in American constitutional law, and barely pretends to.” He talks about how “one must grieve for the Constitution” because of a majority’s approach. He calls the approaches taken in majority opinions “preposterous,” and “so unsupported in reason and so absurd in application [as] unlikely to survive.” He speaks of how a majority opinion “vandaliz[es] . . . our people’s traditions.”

But how did the late Justice Scalia really feel about issues before him and the court? His own words:

On Abortion

The Constitution contains no right to abortion. It is not to be found in the longstanding traditions of our society, nor can it be logically deduced from the text of the Constitution - not, that is, without volunteering a judicial answer to the nonjusticiable question of when human life begins.

On The Written Majority Opinion Legalizing Gay Marriage

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.

On Gay Marriage Itself

This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

On Public Nudity Restrictions

Perhaps the dissenters believe that ‘offense to others’ ought to be the only reason for restricting nudity in public places generally. . . . The purpose of Indiana’s nudity law would be violated, I think, if 60,000 fully consenting adults crowded into the Hoosierdome to display their genitals to one another, even if there were not an offended innocent in the crowd.

On The Court Striking Down Male-Only Admissions

It is hard to consider women a ‘discrete and insular minority’, unable to employ the ‘political processes ordinarily to be relied upon’ when they constitute a majority of the electorate. And the suggestion that they are incapable of exerting that political power smacks of the same paternalism that the Court so roundly condemns.

On Gay Marriage, Again

“The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.” (Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.

On Modern Teaching Of Law

We Americans have a method for making the laws that are over us. We elect representatives to two Houses of Congress, each of which must enact the new law and present it for the approval of a President, whom we also elect. For over two decades now, unelected federal judges have been usurping this lawmaking power by converting what they regard as norms of international law into American law. Today’s opinion approves that process in principle, though urging the lower courts to be more restrained. This Court seems incapable of admitting that some matters - any matters - are none of its business.

Sources: The Washington Post, Wikiquote, Vanity Fair