10 Tasty Tidbits From Justice Antonin Scalia
A wide-ranging interview with Justice Scalia, covering everything from his pet peeves (women cursing), his tastes in television, and his desire to hire more law clerks from "lesser" law schools.
6. He believes in the Devil.
“Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that…. [As for whether I’ve seen recent evidence of the Devil,] it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.”
7. He adores the Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” episode.
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“I loved Seinfeld. In fact, I got some CDs of Seinfeld. Seinfeld was hilarious. Oh, boy. The Nazi soup kitchen? No soup for you!”
(Actually, Your Honor, I think you mean “DVDs.” Also, can we please get “No soup for you!” into a dissent this Term?)
8. His favorite sparring partner on the bench: Justice Stevens.
“Probably John Paul Stevens [was my favorite intellectual combatant]. There are some justices who adopt a magisterial approach to a dissent. Rehnquist used to do it. [He turns his nose up theatrically, flutters his hand in dismissal.] Just, Don’t even respond to the dissent. This is the opinion of the Court, and the hell with you. I am not like that. I think you should give the dissenter the respect to respond to the points that he makes. And so did John Stevens. So he and I used to go back and forth almost endlessly.”
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9. He would like to hire more clerks from “lesser” law schools.
“[O]ther things being equal, which they usually are not, I would like to select somebody from a lesser law school. And I have done that, but really only when I have former clerks on the faculty, whose recommendations I can be utterly confident of. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, they’re sort of spoiled. It’s nice to get a kid who went to a lesser law school. He’s still got something to prove. But you can’t make a mistake. I mean, one dud will ruin your year.”
(Recall what Justice Scalia previously said about Jeff Sutton, his former clerk who now sits on the Sixth Circuit: “I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton. For God’s sake, he went Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best law clerks I ever had.”)
10. His favorite opinion of his is the Morrison v. Olson dissent.
“As to which is the most impressive opinion [I’ve written]: I still think Morrison v. Olson. But look, we have different standards, I suppose, for what’s a great opinion. I care about the reasoning. And the reasoning in Morrison, I thought, was devastating — devastating of the majority. If you ask me which of my opinions will have the most impact in the future, it probably won’t be that dissent; it’ll be some majority opinion. But it’ll have impact in the future not because it’s so beautifully reasoned and so well written. It’ll have impact in the future because it’s authoritative. That’s all that matters, unfortunately.”
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(I agree about the Morrison v. Olson dissent. I remember reading this my 1L year in the middle of the night, getting so excited, and giving Justice Scalia a round of applause — in my room, all alone, at 2 a.m.)
These are just a few highlights of Jennifer Senior’s superb interview with Justice Scalia. If you haven’t done so already, check out the full discussion via the link below.
In Conversation: Antonin Scalia [New York Magazine]
