Word: scalia
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WOULD YOU SUPPORT ASSOCIATE JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA FOR CHIEF JUSTICE IF WILLIAM REHNQUIST HAS TO STEP DOWN? I'm not going to anticipate any of the specific nominations. I'm going to await the President's decisions, and whoever the nominee is, [including] if it's Scalia, we'll give him a comprehensive hearing...
...took 16 years for the high court to come around to Presson's point of view, by a narrow 5-to-4 vote. In 1989 the court ruled 5 to 4 the other way. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 1989 decision, argued that there was neither a "historical nor a modern societal consensus" forbidding capital punishment for 16- or 17-year-olds (though the court had found such a consensus for those under 16 a year earlier). Last week, however, Scalia was on the short side of the decision...
What changed? The views of Justice Anthony Kennedy, for one thing. While Kennedy voted with Scalia in 1989, he wrote a very different majority opinion this time around. Why did Kennedy change his mind? Legal tradition invites him to do so. Since 1958 the court has applied a flexible standard to interpreting the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments." What we mean by the phrase, wrote then Chief Justice Earl Warren in Trop v. Dulles, depends on "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society...
...University of Chicago Law School, and is part of a surprising new trend in Supreme Court thinking. Overseas legal practices were also cited by the court in the 2002 ruling on the mentally retarded and in a 2003 decision overturning a Texas law banning gay sex. For his part, Scalia blasted his brethren for suggesting that "American law should conform to the laws of the rest of the world" and pointed out that the U.S. has unique legal traditions...
Justice Antonin Scalia deigned to write a dissenting opinion in which he called the decision a “mockery,” claiming that this decision somehow contradicted Alexander Hamilton’s assertion that the judiciary has “merely judgment,” as opposed to a will of its own. Scalia did not deign to explain why Hamilton—or, more exactly, Hamilton’s political propaganda—is more pertinent to the U.S. Constitution than a majority of current Justices, nor how, exactly, the Court might have violated this dictum...