Antonin Scalia

WASHINGTON -- The dividing line in yesterday's Supreme Court ruling was straight down the middle -- the five justices to the right of center on the winning side, the four to the left losing.The court's most conservative justices -- Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- anchored the majority, with the chief justice writing the main opinion that strongly supported states' rights against federal power. Justice Thomas wrote a separate opinion taking an even harder line on the constitutional dispute over Congress' authority.

Tom DeLay has long warned of an "out-of-control judiciary" and now his fears have been realized. A series of judges clearly beyond his control - Republicans as well as Democrats, serving on the Texas state bench as well as federal courts - blocked what may be the former House majority leader's last political maneuver. The final blow came Monday, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the court's most conservative members, refused to allow Mr. DeLay to replace himself on a Texas congressional ballot with a hand-picked successor.

MUCH attention is being paid to Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg's March 9 speech on Roe vs. Wade, delivered at New York University School of Law. What she said about abortion and the Constitution is what has attracted attention.She said something else interesting at NYU that may come back to haunt her on the Supreme Court. She criticized what she said was the practice of judges writing dissents that she regarded as offensive and insulting to the judges' whose opinions they disagreed with. This interferes with collegiality, she said.

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was lauded by a Cleveland club yesterday as a champion of free speech. But then he insisted that television and radio reporters leave the room before he spoke to the lunch crowd on his views of the U.S. Constitution. The City Club of Cleveland gives its annual Citadel of Free Speech award to a "distinguished American" who has contributed significantly to "the preservation of the First Amendment." The award cited Scalia's vote in 1989 for a ruling that struck down the laws against flag burning and his opinion for the court in 1992 that struck down a city law against cross burning.

In the arguments before the Supreme Court on the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act, Justice Antonin Scalia likened it to a slippery slope that could lead to the federal government forcing citizens to buy broccoli. In response, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. could have countered Mr. Scalia's argument by comparing the consumption of healthcare services by the willingly uninsured to shoplifting, which is a crime. Many of the 50 million Americans who don't have health insurance can afford to buy it but don't.

Thanks to Dan Rodricks for shining the spotlight on that annoying expression, "spot on" ("Razing the JFX, lowering O's expectations," April 2). It is a British way of thinking that something can be perfectly correct, while in America we know that nothing is perfect. The ultimate irony is that the "spot on" users are referring to Supreme Court arguments where neither side is perfect and a decision will probably be split 5-4. The broccoli analogy was a specious statement by Justice Antonin Scalia to oversimplify the argument and appeal to the anti-government movement.

I was taught Constitutional Law by William Van Alstyne, one of the great constitutional scholars of the last 50 years. No one would ever have considered him anything but a political liberal, but he was bright enough to see the complexity of constitutional issues and was even-handed in his analysis of arguments opposed to his own. His was different in every way from the arrogant, muddled thinking of "scholars" like Garrett Epps. Mr. Epps' article ("The champion of fairness," April 21)

The Sun has published several commentaries, including one by Leonard Pitts Jr. ("Wrong about racism," March 3), discussing Justice Antonin Scalia's recent remark during oral arguments about the Voting Rights Act being a "racial entitlement. " None squarely address the justice's claim that this subject has been written about. Out of curiosity, I did a bit of quick sleuthing and discovered that Mr. Scalia "wrote about it" himself using the term "racial entitlement" in a 1979 law review article written before he joined the Supreme Court.

Maryland has long held claim to the notion that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, or the right to "keep and bear arms," did not apply to the states. In doing so, they have and continue to deny it's citizenry that right to be fully exercised. In 2010, however, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in the certiorari opinion of the landmark case, McDonald vs. Chicago, clearly stated that the Second Amendment does apply to the states. Subsequently, the Maryland Court of Appeals then handed down a decision in Williams vs. Maryland that stated, "If the Supreme Court, in this dicta, meant its holding to extend beyond home possession, it will need to say so more plainly.

A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that police in Maryland and elsewhere can continue the warrantless collection of DNA from people arrested - but not convicted - of serious crimes. The 5-4 decision upheld a state law that allows investigators to take genetic information from arrestees, a practice followed by the federal government and about half the states. Police generally compare suspects' DNA to records from other cases in hopes of developing leads. The case, which amplified a long-running debate over the limits of government search-and-seizure powers, began with a challenge from a Wicomico County man linked to a rape after his DNA was taken in an unrelated arrest.