Comments on: Justice Alito Inaugurates Drexel Law And Waxes Nostalgic

By: Scott Moss

Scott Moss — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 20:23:12 +0000

Robert –

(1) Does a law prof have “better things to do” than to try to gather evidence of a new Supreme Court Justice’s jurisprudential outlook? Not really.

(2) What you call “a handful of pleasant comments” actually is fair to view as praise of originalism, espeically given Alito’s history, on the Third Circuit, of advocating narrow originalist views of the Constitution. E.g., his narrow view of Congress’s power over “interstate commerce” which, in his view, means that Congress was powerless to ban machine guns. In the view of the Cato Institute, this showed that Alito was in fact an originalist. (The following is from a S.F. Chronicle article at the time: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/02/MNG0DFHNR71.DTL):

“In a lone dissenting opinion as a federal appeals court judge in 1996, Alito argued that the federal ban on possessing machine guns was unconstitutional — a stand described by both admirers and detractors Tuesday as one of the most revealing cases in the lengthy judicial record of President Bush’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

‘He understands the original design of the Constitution as being one of limited government,’ said Roger Pilon, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.”

By: Scotus hopeful

Scotus hopeful — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:29:56 +0000

Doesn’t Breyer harken back to the good ol’ days of the late 1700s as well, with the whole “active liberty” argument? And isn’t the implicit point that encouraging “active liberty” is good public policy?

By: Scotus hopeful

Scotus hopeful — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:29:10 +0000

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:49:42 +0000

To attempt to extrapolate Justice Alito’s jurisprudence from a handful of pleasant comments uttered at at a ribbon-cutting cermony is akin to predicting the future by reading tea leaves.

Nice try but don’t you have better things to do?

By: oh, please

oh, please — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 05:44:43 +0000

Right. As long as there was racism and sexism in the past, we can never praise historical figures or any of their deeds, lest we become accomplices to racism and sexism.

It’s not nostalgia to suggest that the Founders must have been intelligent people, nor is it s subtle signal of step 5 of the conservative plan to bring back the Constitution in Exile and “Robert Bork’s America.”

By: Anon

Anon — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:54:11 +0000

The “nostalgia” for a time when white men sat together and wrote a document intended to govern the conduct of all genders and races is surely evocative of Trent Lott and his misty-eyed longing for the good old days when Thurmond thundered away. Only some in the legal academy can be so “nostalgic.”

By: anonymous, too

anonymous, too — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:29:19 +0000

It was nice of Alito to come. Why go out of your way to criticize him?

By: Paul Horwitz

Paul Horwitz — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:55:31 +0000

As Jamison and Orin’s comments suggest, and contrary to Dan’s suggestion that we usually hear an apologetic form of originalism, I think this is entirely consistent with the sentiments of many originalists, and certainly of most originalist judges, non-academic lawyers, and laypeople. It may well be the case that they would take the same position even if they thought various provisions of the Constitution were terrible ideas, then or now. But usually they need not make that choice, because they take an entirely heroic view of the choices made by the framers and of their far-seeing wisdom. It seems difficult to me to really assess that wisdom past a certain point. The interpretation and application of the Constitution has itself been so gradually adaptive to changing circumstances (see, e.g., Levinson and Pildes’s article, or Barry Friedman and Scott Smith’s article on the “Sedimentary Constitution”) that it becomes difficult at a certain point to discern whether the Constitution as we understand it, and as even originalists understand it, has been so long-lived because the framers were so far-seeing, or because we have gradually but drastically departed from their own vision.

By: Orin Kerr

Orin Kerr — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 09:17:40 +0000

Justice Kennedy often says this sort of thing, too.

By: Jamison Colburn

Jamison Colburn — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 05:04:50 +0000

It is interesting, as I think Dan’s post suggests, how different conservatives’ comfort level with originalism varies depending on their apparent understanding of and agreement with founding era morality. Methodologically, that could have significant implications–although, in my recollection, such candid uses of history are rare.