Supreme Court Justice Scalia is so inappropriately biased he should be considered incompetent.
Justice Richard Posner has issued a scathing review of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s and Bryan A. Garner’s recent book Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Justice Posner entitles his review The Incoherence of Antoni Scalia. http://www.tnr.com/...
Posner’s review provides provides clear and convincing evidence Scalia is an intellectual fraud, someone who cloaks his own strongly biases behind attacks on everyone else. Posner makes a strong case Scalia’s views are actually inappropriate partisan bias cloaked by incoherent logic.
Here is an example of Posner destroying Scalia and Garner’s work:
“Scalia and Garner ridicule a decision by the Supreme Court of Kansas (State ex rel. Millerv. Claiborne) that held that cockfighting did not violate the state’s law against cruelty to animals. They say that the court, in defiance of the dictionary, “perversely held that roosters are not ‘animals.’” When I read this, I found it hard to believe that a court would hold that roosters are not animals, so I looked up the case. I discovered that the court had not held that roosters are not animals. It was then that I started reading the other cases cited by Scalia and Garner.
“In fact, the court said that “biologically speaking a fowl is an animal,” but that it was not in the class of animals protected by the statute. The court gave a number of reasons for this conclusion—all ignored by Scalia and Garner. One, which was in fact textual originalist, was that “persons of common intelligence” conceived of chickens as birds in contradistinction to animals.
“But the most cogent reason for the court’s result was that the legislature had passed a statute forbidding cockfighting on Sundays, which implied that it was permissible the rest of the week, and had later repealed the statute, implying that cockfighting was again permissible on any day of the week—and in fact cockfighting was an open and notorious sport in Kansas (to the surprise and disgust of the judges).”
Justice Richard Posner has issued a scathing review of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s and Bryan A. Garner’s recent book Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Justice Posner entitles his review The Incoherence of Antoni Scalia. http://www.tnr.com/...
For the non-lawyers, Supreme Court Justice Scalia is a man with tremendous energy and pattern recognition skills. He is infamous for using polemics in not only his speeches but also in his opinions. Scalia’s use of polemics is rather controversial. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it when asked by a young man, “The secret to my success is that I learned early on that I was not God.” Scalia never understood that.
Justice Posner is a Reagan appointee, famous in academic circles for his economic analysis. Originally, back in the 1980’s, Posner was a champion of de-regulation. Recently, in the past ten years or so, Posner has become increasingly critical of many of the so-called “real” Republicans.
Now, reading and understanding a legal opinion requires a lot of expertise and work: because life is so complicated, the law abounds in nuances and nomenclature shorthand. One area of dispute is how to interpret the Constitution. We can hear someone like Sara Palin telling a crowd she supports “Constitution loving conservatives” but interpreting the Constitution is not so easy. In truth, so-called liberals love the Constitution just as much as any so-called conservative. Putting aside an unwinnable debate about who loves the Constitution or the country more, Scalia’s opinions are used by people like Palin to justify their own prejudices, biases, dishonesty, and outright incompetence.
As one argument used by Scalia to attack various laws and rulings he disagrees with, Scalia claims to have a better means of analyzing the law. He claims that he is merely interpreting the Constitution according to its original intent.
In Reading, Scalia attempts to justify his supposed “Originalism” interpretations of the Constitution and Statutes. Posner provides clear and convincing evidence Scalia is an intellectual fraud, someone who cloaks his own strongly biases behind attacks on everyone else. Posner gives several examples which make it very clear Scalia uses incoherent “logic.”
Here is an example of Posner destroying Scalia and Garner’s work:
“Scalia and Garner ridicule a decision by the Supreme Court of Kansas (State ex rel. Miller v. Claiborne) that held that cockfighting did not violate the state’s law against cruelty to animals. They say that the court, in defiance of the dictionary, “perversely held that roosters are not ‘animals.’” When I read this, I found it hard to believe that a court would hold that roosters are not animals, so I looked up the case. I discovered that the court had not held that roosters are not animals. It was then that I started reading the other cases cited by Scalia and Garner.
“In fact, the court said that “biologically speaking a fowl is an animal,” but that it was not in the class of animals protected by the statute. The court gave a number of reasons for this conclusion—all ignored by Scalia and Garner. One, which was in fact textual originalist, was that “persons of common intelligence” conceived of chickens as birds in contradistinction to animals.
“But the most cogent reason for the court’s result was that the legislature had passed a statute forbidding cockfighting on Sundays, which implied that it was permissible the rest of the week, and had later repealed the statute, implying that cockfighting was again permissible on any day of the week—and in fact cockfighting was an open and notorious sport in Kansas (to the surprise and disgust of the judges).”
Justice Posner’s article provides a good example of the large difference between the honest conservatives—men like Goldwater, John Ashcroft, and Justice Posner himself—and men like Nino Scalia. It’s a perfect example of Scalia “logic” that he’d ridicule the Kansas Supreme Court based on a false factual assertion which that court never made. As Justice Posner points out, few will have the time or resources to check Mr. Scalia’s footnotes or his other factual assertions. And Scalia himself brags about his embrace of superstitious bias. I'd add that Scalia, for all his bloviating, has offered nothing new to the methods by which judges interpret statutes--indeed, Scalia's out of control ego and inappropriate biases have done great damage to our judicial institutions.
For starters, Scalia should retract his book and issue an apology to the judges who authored em> Miller v Claiborne. Like Posner, if they read Scalia's book, they'll consider Scalia a complete idiot.