Scalia

So I went to see a Scalia Q&A today, as Harvard is celebrating his 20 years on the Court with dinners, events, and this afternoon's "A Conversation with Justice Antonin Scalia."

The room was packed, and overflowed into another huge auditorium...and the room was filled with the loud chattering of any auditorium. I spent the hour reading my Corporations and looking around the room, and confirmed, again, that I don't really like it here all that much. (Why? I noticed a lot of expensive clothing...which always puts me off. And it's not when someone buys a nice suit or a few nice things, or even owns all nice things...it's when seemingly everyone wears all nice things that annoys me. And not even really interesting nice things...but normal things, in the more expensive version. Like a 200 dollar dress shirt type shit.) Anyway, I digress. And in walks a group of people, with a short, chubby man who waddles just a little, and the silence is immediate. Awesome.

Anyway, Scalia is really a remarkable man. I think he's wrong of course, but he's got an intellectually defensible position that brilliantly binds philosophical consistency to conservative outcomes, though that's apparently just a fortunate side effect (ie. destroying the legacy of the Warren Court). In essence, he deflects all questions of substance with method. And it just so happens that the method would probably result in substance closely aligned with his own beliefs. I won't really go into what he actually discussed, but the man is certainly eloquent, witty, and very charismatic. (And short. And rotund.)

The only point he put across that I still can't get around is that the most important and pressing issues in our lives should not be placed into the hands of lawyers. That is, legal practice and lawyering provides no institutional competence for decision-making. This isn't a new problem that's just been revealed to me, but my distrust for the competence lawyers is a hurdle I can't get over.

And of course, when you open the floor to student questions, it can be annoying. As expected, a shrill global warming activist decided to try and deliver an opening statement about global warming with all of the fear-mongering imagery and moral coercion nakedly revealed...which, as usual, was as profoundly unhelpful as can be imagined. I've noticed a phenomenon since arriving here and watching speakers...the crazies always stand up with a piece of paper with crap scrawled all over it...and as they begin talking, you can sense the beginning of a speech, and as the "question" gets longer and more awkward, their voices start to go flat and they read stupid cliche statements in the same stupid voice as they lose eye contact with the target and bury their faces in the handscrawled notes. This is the 8th time this has happened since I arrived. (If you count the 7 that happened at the WTO speech)

The rest of the 15 questions were the same question, over and over again: "Doesn't (blank) prove that originalism is wrong?" The blanks ranged from technological change to Brown v. BoE, to the meaning of language...and whatever else. Essentially, we spent an hour attacking Scalia's originalism, and he spent an hour deftly stomping down every single argument.

In any case, I'm bored and decided to just post something.