Justice Scalia Quotes

A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.

It is myopic to base sweeping change on the narrow experience of a few years.

exuberant presence of Justice Scalia, the Court is “a paler place.” The two cases at the top of Justice Ginsburg’s most

Once asked how we could be friends, given our disagreement on lots of things, Justice Scalia answered: 'I attack ideas. I don't attack people.

Everyone wears blindfolds at a High Court trial," the manager replied, "except the judges, of course. Haven't you heard the expression justice is blind?" "Yes," Klaus said, "but I always thought it meant that justice should be fair and unprejudiced." "The verdict of the High Court was to take the expression literally," said the manager. "So everyone except the judges must cover their eyes before the trial can begin." "Scalia," Sunny said. She meant something like, "It doesn't seem like the literal interpretation makes any sense," but her siblings did not think it was wise to translate.

As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: “We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only what the statute means.

Alexis de Tocqueville, observing that “there was hardly a political question in the United States that did not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.”1

The justice would term it “the shame of my life” that, despite a classical education that included six years of Latin and five of Greek, he never learned Italian as his father wished.

More tells his son-in-law Roper, “Whoever hunts for me, Roper, God or Devil, will find me hiding in the thickets of the law! And I’ll hide my daughter with me! Not hoist her up to the mainmast of your seagoing principles! They put about too nimbly!”5

By judicial conservative, I mean a judge who does not advance any political or policy preferences, but whose approach to constitutional and statutory interpretation involves fidelity to the text of the Constitution and adherence to the original understanding of that document or to the intent of its drafters.

Justice Antonin Scalia for the Supreme Court. You can either choose diversity, he contended, or you can choose to be ‘super-duper’. If a diverse workforce, student population, or whatever, emerges organically through the pursuit of excellence, that is one thing. But to privilege diversity above excellence is different.

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. [Referring to pronouncement by Justice Anthony Kennedy in Obergefell v. Hodges: "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."]

During Scalia's confirmation hearing, so many senators brought up Italian connections that Senator Howell Heflin, a Democrat from Alabama, told the nominee, 'I believe that almost every Senator that has an Italian American connection has come forward to welcome you...I would be remiss if I did not mention the fact that my great-great-grandfather married a widow who was married first to an Italian American." Getting Heflin's joke, Scalia shot back, 'Senator, I have been to Alabama several times, too.

I wish I had asked myself when I was younger. My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted— accurately— that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore. And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past. the best paths are new and untried. will this business still be around a decade from now? business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else. The few who knew what might be learned, Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, Mankind has always crucified and burned. Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect, Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.

Consider the various ways in which Trump’s campaign represented a one-man campaign against established knowledge. He was one of the original “birthers” who demanded that Barack Obama prove his American citizenship. He quoted the National Enquirer approvingly as a source of news. He sided with antivaccine activism. He admitted that he gets most of his information on foreign policy from “the shows” on Sunday morning television. He suggested that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died from natural causes in early 2016, might have been murdered. And he charged that the father of one of his opponents (Ted Cruz) was involved in the Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Our appointment and confirmation process has, in other words, evolved into a mini-plebiscite on the meaning of the Constitution whenever a new justice is to be seated.

asked by Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times about the fact that in that same term, the number of female clerks fell to single digits for the first time in more than a decade. Only seven women would be among the thirty-seven clerks, and two of them were working for RBG. Why not ask a justice who had hired no women? suggested RBG. That would be Alito, Souter, Scalia, and Thomas.

Justice Scalia in Smith, citing Reynolds: If the law’s authority were to vary based on the diverse moral and religious commitments of citizens, then all persons could become a law unto themselves.

Once asked how we could be friends, given our disagreemt on lots of things, Justice Scalia answered: "I attack ideas. i don´t attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas. And if you can´t seperate the two, you gotta get another day job. You don´t want to be a judge. At least not a judge on a multi-member panel.

Trump nominates Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, to replace Antonin Scalia who died back in February 2016. President Obama moved to nominate Judge Merrick Garland for the position but was famously blocked by Mitch McConnell who said you could not nominate, let alone confirm a new Supreme Court justice in the final year of a president's

when the EPA issued its first-ever plan to limit carbon emissions from power plants and five conservative justices (then including Justice Scalia) blocked the law while it was still under review in the lower courts, before it had even reached them. This was a procedural eyebrow-raiser of a ruling without precedent in U.S. history, one that I reckon saved the fossil fuel industry $100 billion per year (assuming it would have cost them about one-sixth of their annual federal pollution subsidy).3

We have seen what a group of dishonest and unscrupulous lawyers will do in service to Donald Trump. An American president surrounded by people like these could dismantle our republic. It would not necessarily all happen on the first day of a second Trump term. But step by step, Donald Trump would tear down the walls that our framers so carefully built to combat centralized power and tyranny. He would attempt to dismantle what Justice Antonin Scalia called the “real constitutional law.” Perhaps Trump would start by refusing to enforce certain judicial rulings he opposed. He has already attacked the judiciary repeatedly, and ignored the rulings of scores of courts. He knows that judicial rulings have force only if the executive branch enforces them. So he won’t. Certainly, Donald Trump would run the US government with acting officials who are not, and could not be, confirmed by the Senate. He would obtain a bogus legal opinion allowing him to do it. He would ensure that the Senate confirmation process is no longer any check on his authority. The types of resignation threats that may have kept Trump at bay before—that, for example, convinced him to reverse his appointment of Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general—would no longer be a deterrent. Trump would be eager for those who oppose his actions at the Justice Department and elsewhere to resign. And, at the Department of Defense (where a single US senator, one of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters, is doing great harm to America’s national security by refusing to allow the confirmation of senior civilian or military officials), Trump would

He noted more than once that had Citizens United released the same material in a different format—on the Internet or in a book, for instance—there would be no constitutional issue, as Congress had only banned corporate electioneering for broadcast media. Justice Scalia appeared to agree, and offered some thoughts that seemed to aid Olson’s position: It may well be that the kind of speech that is reflected in a serious 90-minute documentary is entitled to greater constitutional protection. And it may well be that the kind of speech that is not only offered but invited by the listener is entitled to heightened First Amendment scrutiny, which is what this is since you have pay for view. Scalia’s was an important distinction, if one accepted the premise that Congress had sought to ban electioneering communications with the understanding that the voting public could find corporate-funded advertising persuasive, and also that people would have little choice with regard to the advertisements that they saw during a given telecast. Because people were in effect paying to watch Hillary: The Movie at their leisure (via television on-demand), Scalia was suggesting that perhaps it was difficult to argue that they were being forcibly influenced.

... an analysis of postmodernist literary criticism and its relevance to the criminal justice system, but in fact a hodgepodge of arcane theories and suppositions that became so byzantine even I couldn’t understand them. Something about Jacques Derrida, Sir Edward Coke, and Antonin Scalia meet My Cousin Vinnie. Not that the inability to understand your own work disqualifies you from publication.

A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy. Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular constituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers[18] who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans[19]), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And 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.

In May, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the main speaker at a fundraiser event for the new numerary residence that Opus Dei was building in Reston, Virginia.

My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted—accurately—that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore. And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

I felt he was speaking

I think when it’s wrong,” Scalia says, “it should be destroyed.” But no one, probably least of all Supreme Court justices, changes her or his mind after being called an idiot. Actually changing the law means getting to five votes.

Few men or women in our lifetimes have been so unjustly vilified in the popular media as the late Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court. If you are not a lawyer who read his opinions, if you know nothing about Justice Scalia other than what you have read in the popular press, you have surely been deceived into believing that this man was some sort of archconservative who could regularly be counted upon to side with the government and trample the constitutional liberties of the poor and the powerless. The truth is much more complicated than that. While Justice Scalia was, by his own admission, exceptionally stingy in refusing to accept arguments about constitutional rights that involved some aspect of general "liberty" that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution—rights like abortion, or same-sex marriage—when it came to the defense of constitutional liberties that are explicitly described in the Constitution, no other recent member of the Supreme Court was so uncompromisingly passionate and liberal in refusing to water down those protections.

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.

A worldly wise and somewhat overbearing Lucy asks the good-hearted and somewhat naive Charlie Brown, ‘Charlie, what would you rather do, be captain of the baseball team or marry the cute redheaded girl?’ And Charlie replies innocently, ‘Why can’t I do both?’ to which Lucy responds, ‘It’s the real world, Charlie Brown.’ “60

A Hard Left For High-School History The College Board version of our national story BY STANLEY KURTZ | 1215 words AT the height of the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, conservatives were alive to the dangers of a leftist takeover of American higher education. Today, with the coup all but complete, conservatives take the loss of the academy for granted and largely ignore it. Meanwhile, America’s college-educated Millennial generation drifts ever farther leftward. Now, however, an ambitious attempt to force a leftist tilt onto high-school U.S.-history courses has the potential to shake conservatives out of their lethargy, pulling them back into the education wars, perhaps to retake some lost ground. The College Board, the private company that develops the SAT and Advanced Placement (AP) exams, recently ignited a firestorm by releasing, with little public notice, a lengthy, highly directive, and radically revisionist “framework” for teaching AP U.S. history. The new framework replaces brief guidelines that once allowed states, school districts, and teachers to present U.S. history as they saw fit. The College Board has promised to generate detailed guidelines for the entire range of AP courses (including government and politics, world history, and European history), and in doing so it has effectively set itself up as a national school board. Dictating curricula for its AP courses allows the College Board to circumvent state standards, virtually nationalizing America’s high schools, in violation of cherished principles of local control. Unchecked, this will result in a high-school curriculum every bit as biased and politicized as the curriculum now dominant in America’s colleges. Not coincidentally, David Coleman, the new head of the College Board, is also the architect of the Common Core, another effort to effectively nationalize American K–12 education, focusing on English and math skills. As president of the College Board, Coleman has found a way to take control of history, social studies, and civics as well, pushing them far to the left without exposing himself to direct public accountability. Although the College Board has steadfastly denied that its new AP U.S. history (APUSH) guidelines are politically biased, the intellectual background of the effort indicates otherwise. The early stages of the APUSH redesign overlapped with a collaborative venture between the College Board and the Organization of American Historians to rework U.S.-history survey courses along “internationalist” lines. The goal was to undercut anything that smacked of American exceptionalism, the notion that, as a nation uniquely constituted around principles of liberty and equality, America stands as a model of self-government for the world. Accordingly, the College Board’s new framework for AP U.S. history eliminates the traditional emphasis on Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon and its echoes in American history. The Founding itself is demoted and dissolved within a broader focus on transcontinental developments, chiefly the birth of an exploitative international capitalism grounded in the slave trade. The Founders’ commitment to republican principles is dismissed as evidence of a benighted belief in European cultural superiority. Thomas Bender, the NYU historian who leads the Organization of American Historians’ effort to globalize and denationalize American history, collaborated with the high-school and college teachers who eventually came to lead the College Board’s APUSH redesign effort. Bender frames his movement as a counterpoint to the exceptionalist perspective that dominated American foreign policy during the George W. Bush ad ministration. Bender also openly hopes that students exposed to his approach will sympathize with Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s willingness to use foreign law to interpret the U.S. Constitution rather than with Justice Antonin Scalia�

accommodate, within reason, the religious practices of workers and applicants unless they impose an “undue hardship” on the business. It is the latest in a line of Supreme Court cases that have elevated religious rights over secular interests, whether exercised by powerful corporations, government agencies or prison inmates. The majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia stressed two points that outline the role religion can have in the workplace. Employers must do more than handle religious practices in the same way they do secular ones, he wrote, because federal law gives faith-related expression “favored treatment, affirmatively obligating employers” to accommodate things they could otherwise refuse. Moreover, he wrote, an applicant or employee alleging religious discrimination doesn’t have to prove the employer was motivated by bias.

In a 2014 interview with New York Magazine, senior Associate Justice Antonin Scalia stated his belief that there is an actual devil. Not a mythical creature representing the dark side of the human heart, but an actual, malevolent entity living in a fiery netherworld who, like some Bond villain holding a pitchfork instead an albino pussycat, is actually plotting to corrupt mankind. This was stated with confidence, even arrogance, by a man who made decisions affecting the lives of 350 million Americans and, by extension, the world.

The Lord has saved Justice Scalia from the Jews who couldn't find a single leak into his sanity; while living in the house of Pharaoh, God drew him out of America as a witness. With all modesty and perseverance, he made it through while being humble, honoring to Moses and rejecting any talk of a legacy after him or on his behalf.

Formalism has an austere elegance. It appeals to people like G.H. Hardy, Antonin Scalia, and me, who relish that feeling of a nice rigid theory shut tight against contradiction. But it's not easy to hold to principles like this consistently, and it's not clear it's even wise. Even Justice Scalia has occasionally conceded that when the literal words of the law seem to require an absurd judgment, the literal words have to be set aside in favor of a reasonable guess as to what Congress must have meant. In just the same way, no scientist really wants to be bound strictly by the rules of significance, no matter what they say their principles are. When you run two experiments, one testing a clinical treatment that seems theoretically promising and the other testing whether dead salmon respond emotionally to romantic photos, and both experiments succeed with p-values of .03, you don't really want to treat the two hypotheses the same. You want to approach absurd conclusions with an extra coat of skepticism, rules be damned.

As Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia (typically a Constitutional cheerleader) admitted, amending the Constitution “ought to be hard, but not that hard.

Gun rights are claimed as an American birthright and clothed in the dignity of the Constitution, but this is a false and fabricated history. To believe in the gun, you have to subscribe to a series of fantasies about the American past. You have to believe Theodore Roosevelt when he says that guns civilized the West and that the men who died “generally” deserved their fate. You have to believe Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas when he writes that firearms brought “possibilities of salvation” to African Americans after the Civil War. You would have to believe that, for two hundred years, every court in the land got the Second Amendment wrong, until Antonin Scalia rode in with his dictionaries in 2008.

(5) THE HAMMER has the Supreme Court under illegal surveillance including and, most particularly. Chief Justice John Roberts (Brennan and Clapper also had Justice Scalia under surveillance with THE HAMMER); (6) Lockheed Martin’s supercomputers

Justice Scalia wrote for the Court that former attorney general Ashcroft was protected by qualified immunity because there was no clearly established law that his conduct was unconstitutional.

The problem with determining whether recusal is in order is that, by history and tradition, the justices decide for themselves whether to step down from a case, and, if so, whether they will offer an explanation as to why. Like other members of the Supreme Court, Scalia served as his own judge and jury on the question of recusal. And with each new controversy he pushed the line of acceptability for him a little further. Every time he survived a con-troversy, he seemed to interpret that event as granting him permission to do it again-eventually moving him far beyond the point where many thought he had crossed ethical lines. Having survived

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the plurality, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment as a basis for finding for plaintiffs, noting that the Equal Protection Clause “guarantees equal protection of the law to persons, not equal representation in government to equivalently sized groups.” The plurality opinion cited one of the leading casebooks on voting rights for the proposition that, throughout its subsequent history, “Bandemer has served almost exclusively as an invitation to litigation without much prospect of redress.”88 Justice Scalia pointed out that those who had sought relief under Bandemer had achieved nothing except to rack up substantial legal fees. The

Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my

has put forth the possibility that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (AS) was murdered to stage a liberal takeover of the Supreme Court (SC). 187 is the California penal code section for homicide. There was no autopsy performed after Scalia was found dead.

When the Republicans would not agree to conduct hearings to consider the president’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant after Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016, even the usually reticent Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas spoke out. “At some point,” he told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, “we are going to have to recognize that we are destroying our institutions.”6 But what if the goal of all these actions was to destroy our institutions, or at least change them so radically that they became shadows of their former selves?

As McGahn later told the Federalist Society, “The greatest threat to the rule of law in our modern society is the ever-expanding regulatory state, and the most effective bulwark against that threat is a strong judiciary.”10 Overturning Chevron would help with Bannon’s promised deconstruction. And that, for all evangelical voters’ focus on the Supreme Court and social issues such as abortion, was the real goal. The emphasis on social conservatism and its associated hot-button issues ended with Scalia, McGahn said at the first meeting after the election to discuss the justice’s successor. It was now all about regulatory relief. On that score, McGahn said, Scalia “wouldn’t make the cut.

He lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud. He agreed with Infowars’ Alex Jones that Hillary Clinton might have taken some form of drugs to enhance her debate performance and demanded, “I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate. I do.”24 Trump attacked his primary opponent Senator Ted Cruz by linking his father to the JFK assassination. He has said that a pillow was found on the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia’s face and he might have been murdered. He’s sided with the anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts. Most famously, he laid the groundwork for his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising he could prove President Barack Obama was born in Africa. He’s claimed President Obama wore a ring with an Arabic inscription. He’s said global warming is a “hoax,” that windmills cause cancer.

You can't ride with the cops, but root for the robbers.

Statutory language need not be colloquial,” Justice Scalia explained, and “the term ‘corruptly’ in criminal laws has a longstanding and well-accepted meaning. It denotes an act done with an intent to give some advantage inconsistent with official duty and the rights of others.

Justice Scalia added that “in the context of obstructing jury proceedings, any claim of ignorance of wrongdoing is incredible.