In January, The Scrapbook was privileged to be in attendance at a speech Antonin Scalia gave to a small audience at Catholic University. We can’t claim to have known the man or even to have met him for more than a handshake, but Scalia was such a presence that even being in the same room with him was a thrill. His written words were surpassingly impressive, but his boisterous and gregarious delivery only added to the impression that one was in the presence of greatness.
In his speech, Scalia told an amusing anecdote about how he approached the law and why he embraced originalism. When he was a much younger man, a student in one of his college classes kept questioning the internal logic of a text they were reading. Finally exasperated, the professor told the student, “Shakespeare is not on trial! You are.”
One did not have to agree with Scalia to appreciate his personal qualities, to say nothing of his legal acumen. Nonetheless, as soon as Scalia died, the knives were drawn. After Georgetown Law School sent out a press release noting the school was mourning his death (he received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown and was the 1957 valedictorian and a champion debater there), two of the school’s longtime professors, Gary Peller and Louis Michael Seidman, issued a public dissent saying that many at Georgetown’s community “cringed at . . . the unmitigated praise with which the press release described a jurist that many of us believe was a defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry, one whose intellectual positions were not brilliant but simplistic and formalistic.”
There’s a great irony in Peller’s disdaining Scalia’s prodigious intellect as “simplistic.” Peller’s own specialty is in critical race theory and critical legal studies, which are hardly summits of academic rigor. As the Daily Caller put it, a “major part of Peller’s work is denying the very existence of objective knowledge or the value of concepts like rationality, on the grounds that knowledge is just ‘a function of the ability of the powerful to impose their own views.’ ”
Fortunately, more than a few honest liberals testified to the truth of who Scalia was. Cass Sunstein, a former Obama administration official and respected legal scholar, wrote a glowing remembrance for Bloomberg. He recalled that in 1994 after Bill Clinton swore in his second liberal justice, Stephen Breyer, “Justice Antonin Scalia came up to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and said with a bright, mischievous smile, “First Ruth [Bader Ginsburg], and now Steve? Cass, it’s almost enough to make me vote Democrat.”
Still, the number of supposedly respectable liberal voices attacking Scalia is positively dispiriting. But we take comfort in the fact that Scalia was an indisputably great man. It’s not his life and work that are on trial. Those taking the occasion of his death to attack the man’s legacy are only indicting themselves.
