Commenting on Rochanna's repost from the Daily Kos fulminating over Scalia and his use of the word "blacks" ....
Oh bunkum. I get tired of the "left" (as if) constantly dumping on Scalia without ever bothering to read any of his opinions. (As when Maureen Dowd lambasted him for being anti-wimin because he dissented from an opinion written by The Great Mother Sotomayor ... forgetting to mention oddly enough that Justice Ginzburg (a woman last i looked) joined Scalia in the dissent).
Scalia is a legal formalist. That means that his opinions are (1) grammatically intelligible (as opposed to to Breyer's mush-brained incoherencies) and (2) legally guided by the ordinary sound and sense of words. In other words, there is some "there" there apart from mere desire for a result.
Law is not math. There is no one way to add up words. As a result i often do not agree with the way Scalia has added the words up. Nevertheless i can still see and argue with the structure of his arguments which is more than i can say for others on the court who use words merely as a form of articulated howl.
These "others" are usually the so-called "liberals" but not always. Justice Roberts' non-tax tax (in the decision upholding most of Obombocare) was an example of an articulate howl. If you want to get a sense of Scalia's thought processes and scathing humour read his dissent.
Scalia has written some opinions with which i strongly disagree. He has written others which have put teeth into basic fundamental rights: as the right to confront witness (and not some hearsay report written by a so-called "expert") and the right to have the jury (and not some state-paid judge) decide your case and what you are punished for. These issues seldom make the front pages of the media.
As for his remark about the Fourteenth Amendment ... Scalia certainly knows that the Fourteenth Amendment was aimed at protecting blacks from Jim Crow legislation. Those most important early cases on the amendment say as much as everyone in law school gets to learn. Since then, however, the Equal Protection Clause has long since been extended to apply to everyone. So what Scalia is criticised for saying is true.
As for his use of the word "blacks" -- i am up to my eyeballs with USians fetishizing about what to call its minorities. Mexican-Americans, Chicanos, Lateeen-ohs, Hispanics,.... As for the former slaves, the approved appellation as gone from Colored, to Negro, to Afro-American, to Black, to now not black or negro but to African-American. Who the fuck cares.
I suppose someone should go back a re-edit all the supreme court opinions to make sure that they are updated with the correct label.
I don't like African-American because it's stupid. Africa is not a nation like Italy, Ireland, Germany, Mexico. So the nationality hyphen makes no sense. The continent hyphen is inaccurate because Egyptians are semitic and not negroid, half of South AFRICA is white and North Africa is mostly Arab.
Oh bunkum. I get tired of the "left" (as if) constantly dumping on Scalia without ever bothering to read any of his opinions. (As when Maureen Dowd lambasted him for being anti-wimin because he dissented from an opinion written by The Great Mother Sotomayor ... forgetting to mention oddly enough that Justice Ginzburg (a woman last i looked) joined Scalia in the dissent).
Scalia is a legal formalist. That means that his opinions are (1) grammatically intelligible (as opposed to to Breyer's mush-brained incoherencies) and (2) legally guided by the ordinary sound and sense of words. In other words, there is some "there" there apart from mere desire for a result.
Law is not math. There is no one way to add up words. As a result i often do not agree with the way Scalia has added the words up. Nevertheless i can still see and argue with the structure of his arguments which is more than i can say for others on the court who use words merely as a form of articulated howl.
These "others" are usually the so-called "liberals" but not always. Justice Roberts' non-tax tax (in the decision upholding most of Obombocare) was an example of an articulate howl. If you want to get a sense of Scalia's thought processes and scathing humour read his dissent.
Scalia has written some opinions with which i strongly disagree. He has written others which have put teeth into basic fundamental rights: as the right to confront witness (and not some hearsay report written by a so-called "expert") and the right to have the jury (and not some state-paid judge) decide your case and what you are punished for. These issues seldom make the front pages of the media.
As for his remark about the Fourteenth Amendment ... Scalia certainly knows that the Fourteenth Amendment was aimed at protecting blacks from Jim Crow legislation. Those most important early cases on the amendment say as much as everyone in law school gets to learn. Since then, however, the Equal Protection Clause has long since been extended to apply to everyone. So what Scalia is criticised for saying is true.
As for his use of the word "blacks" -- i am up to my eyeballs with USians fetishizing about what to call its minorities. Mexican-Americans, Chicanos, Lateeen-ohs, Hispanics,.... As for the former slaves, the approved appellation as gone from Colored, to Negro, to Afro-American, to Black, to now not black or negro but to African-American. Who the fuck cares.
I suppose someone should go back a re-edit all the supreme court opinions to make sure that they are updated with the correct label.
I don't like African-American because it's stupid. Africa is not a nation like Italy, Ireland, Germany, Mexico. So the nationality hyphen makes no sense. The continent hyphen is inaccurate because Egyptians are semitic and not negroid, half of South AFRICA is white and North Africa is mostly Arab.
