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Rest in Peace, Justice Scalia
Much has been said and will be said for generations about Justice Antonin Scalia’s legal and intellectual legacy. I have nothing to add but a favorite memory:
Quite a mistake to get on the losing side of an argument with him.
I’m struck as I always am by the puzzle of death. He had nine children and 36 grandchildren. They and his wife, I’m sure, are devastated. He was a devout Catholic, and clearly he believed, and his family believes, that he has not been extinguished by death but at last born into eternity. Still, the mystery will be there: But why can’t he pick up the phone anymore when I call him?
No one could say he left unlived any aspect of a well-lived life. He would have been 80 next month, and we should all hope to stay so young for so long. Clearly he was suffering from none of the typical physical or intellectual deficits of old age. His mind was what it had always been and he died as we all hope we will, in his sleep. He spent his last day at a West Texas ranch in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert. As Emily Schnall describes it,
The storied night sky is full of stars. Over the wide expanse of desert grasslands roam buffalo, wild pigs, mountain lions, Barbary sheep, elk and white-tailed deer. Bird hunts at the base of a bluff on the property include pheasant and chukar shoots, white-tailed dove and blue quail. The hotel’s weapons room provides an “array of rifles, pistols and shotguns, including fine-quality Spanish side-by-sides, and plenty of ammunition” …
He knew that he had imparted to the United States a great and enduring juridical and intellectual legacy. If he had awareness of the imminence of death, it was clearly not until the evening, when he repaired to bed. Only in the morning was the priest summoned to administer the last rites.
I hope that contemplating the life he led and the tranquility of his death brings as much peace to his family as it could in the wake of such a loss.
Published in General, Law
This doesn’t explain why applying a 200-yer old law is insane and insulting to the object of the decision. If the above is your argument, then “there is all of insanity & not little of insult in sitting around wondering what people thought more than 200 years ago…” is a sententious tho stylish way of saying something different.
…because Hobbes!
Yes, they are different, as beer is different from the bottle, but the former flows from the latter. I don’t buy the Enlightenment mumbo-jumbo that “inalienable” NRs are or can be exchanged for political rights. Whichever way you construe “endowed by their Creator”, this,
speaks not of replacement but of the political order confirming and guaranteeing NRs.
NL, btw, sees society as inherent in human nature, not something imposed on an impossible Hobbesian anthropology that actually describes the life of orangutans.
You are right about Natural Law: It does not assume, with Hobbes, that man is apolitical.
Now, for the rest: How do you propose that gov’t can secure the rights of the people without them surrendering natural rights! Let me point out that your Declaration insists that for all the individual creation of men with rights: It is only a community, & not the States, the People who can create a political association. There’s another show of the surrender of natural rights.
Of course, you’re not forced to believe any mumbo-jumbo. But had your Founders not believed it, America would not exist. I suggest, therefore, that you take them somewhat more seriously than say, ju-ju or voodoo…
As for my point about how the laws seem to citizens now, you’re obviously not at all trying, so I’m not going to make the effort. If you do not know that many among your countrymen, from the least to the most educated, from the least to the most influential, from the secretly private to those authorized to exercise public offices, are opposed to being ruled by old laws, you are a blessed man. But perhaps you should avoid political discussions where you are likely to hear that.
Also, avoid reading Jefferson–you might learn he wanted to short-circuit all laws, including a Constitution every 17 years. Also, avoid Tom Paine. Otherwise, you will do fine-