JUSTICE SCALIA COMES TO CONNECTICUT
April 13th, 2006 by Peter
My pro-family quote in an Apr. 1 Courant story provoked a letter-to-the-editor today by someone claiming the U.S. Constitution requires same-sex “marriage.” Justice Scalia dismissed such nonsense in his UConn Law appearance yesterday:
Touching on some of the most recent controversial Supreme Court cases, the 70-year-old jurist expanded on his view that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted only by what the nation’s forefathers wrote in the document, rather than seeing the Constitution through the evolving standards of time.
Brian and I attended Justice Scalia’s address to the Federalist Society on Tuesday. The man was every bit as brilliant, witty and approachable as this week’s media stories are reporting.
Most of his Tuesday speech was similar to the UConn lecture described in the New Haven Register:
The early-20th century was a period in which the public looked to political appointees as “experts” on a range of topics, Scalia told audience members. Now the public looks to judges for wisdom on whether abortion, execution and other practices should be allowed, he said.
“I am questioning the propriety, indeed the sanity, of having a value-laden decision made for the entire society by unelected judges,” he said. “There are no scientifically demonstrable right answers to these questions, as opposed to answers that a particular society favors.”
Even if there were right answers, Scalia said, a lawyer or judge is no better equipped to answer them than a medical doctor, engineer, ethicist “or even the famed Joe Six-Pack.”
But he did stay long at his Tuesday appearance and took many questions from the audience. When asked about what the future holds for the originalist understanding of the Constitution he noted the addition of three strict constructionist thinkers to the faculty of Harvard Law School, something that would have been unheard of only a few years earlier.
“I used to feel like Frodo in the Lord of the Rings,” he said. “We’re doing the right thing, but we are doomed, doomed!” And now?
“I am cautiously optimistic.”
