Justice Scalia

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.

The legal blogosphere was buzzing last month with the discovery of a major gaffe in a Supreme Court decision that had just been released. What attracted all the attention was not so much the substance of the error - misrepresenting the position of the Environmental Protection Agency in a case decided in 2001 - but its source: Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of the court's decision in the 2001 case. I know from personal experience, mistakes can happen, even at the highest court of the land.

IT COMES AS no surprise to anybody familiar with the opinions of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia that he disagrees with many decisions the court has handed down in recent decades. The 1973 abortion ruling is a good example. Justice Scalia does not believe the right to privacy spelled out in that decision is anywhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution. He has said that plenty of times in speeches.In recent years, he has been equally outspoken on the right to die. Justice Scalia believes no such right can be found in the Constitution and should not be. He has warned against the tendency to rely on law and legal proceedings to solve complex societal dilemmas.

 You've read about their clashing views in all of those 5-4 Supreme Court decisions. Now hear them sing their arguments. "Scalia/Ginsburg," a comic opera by Baltimore native and recent law school grad Derrick Wang, imagines Justice Antonin Scalia having to get through three ordeals -- shades of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" -- with the help of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In the summer of 2013, excerpts from the work-in-progress were performed at the Supreme Court for Scalia and Ginsburg, two longtime friends and opera fans who gave the project a thumbs up. "It was such a great honor," Wang says.

The legal blogosphere was buzzing last month with the discovery of a major gaffe in a Supreme Court decision that had just been released. What attracted all the attention was not so much the substance of the error - misrepresenting the position of the Environmental Protection Agency in a case decided in 2001 - but its source: Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of the court's decision in the 2001 case. I know from personal experience, mistakes can happen, even at the highest court of the land.

"GET A LIFE, judge." That was the reaction provoked by reading Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's petulant dissent in Romer vs. Evans, which struck down Colorado's anti-gay amendment.He doesn't bother to disguise his loathing for homosexuals. He criticizes them for having "high disposable income," "possessing political power much greater than their numbers" and enjoying "enormous influence in American media and politics."Could call it envy -- except U.S. Supreme Court justices enjoy more of the same.

FIVE days before two teen-agers went on a murderous shooting rampage in a Colorado high school, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told a group of students at the Park School in Baltimore County that if he had his way, people would have more -- not less -- access to deadly weapons.At a small luncheon following his speech to 300 students there, Justice Scalia said that citizens have a right to own machine guns, said Jessica Munitz, a 17-year-old Park senior.Pressing the outer limits of his thinking on this matter, Jessica -- who has earned early admission to Princeton University -- said she asked Justice Scalia if he thought people should also "be allowed to have hand-held rockets that can bring down airplanes."

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told 400 people at the University of Baltimore Law School last night that courts should not use legislative history to interpret laws, that he does not feel any sense of power in the job and that he is sorry the First Amendment required him to sanction burning of the American flag."

WASHINGTON -- When the Yankees play at Camden Yards, a famous -- and devoted -- fan of theirs sometimes can be found in a good seat there. But not easily. He will blend in perfectly, wearing an ordinary baseball cap and glasses. He won't look a thing like Antonin Scalia.It may be only at the ballpark that Justice Scalia really blends in. At the Supreme Court, where he works as the nation's premier showman-judge-theoretician, he is a loner who is losing regularly in a stubborn fight to protect the true conservative cause against the "balancers," the moderates in the middle of the road who are now in control.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told 400 people at the University of Baltimore Law School last night that courts should not use legislative history to interpret laws, that he does not feel any sense of power in the job and that he is sorry the First Amendment required him to sanction burning of the American flag."

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: ERSATZ English merrily plunders other languages whenever it finds something shiny. Ersatz (pronounced ERR-zahtz) is lifted directly from the German, where it means a substitution or an imitation, usually inferior, for the real thing. The OED cites an example from 1949: "A breakfast of black bread and captured ersatz coffee made from roasted grain.

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.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is alleged to be one of the great intellects of conservative jurisprudence, but his comments during oral arguments over a challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act displayed all the mental acuity of a third-tier talk radio bozo. Shelby County, Ala., is making the case against the voting law. Section 5 of the act empowers the federal government to negate new local and state voting rules if they would lead to discrimination against minority voters.

The first day of a big week for the third branch of government brought a ruling on Arizona's immigration law that was less than satisfying for Justice Antonin Scalia and the Rush Limbaugh wing of the U.S. Supreme Court. A five-vote majority that included Chief Justice John Roberts struck down all but one provision of the controversial statute, asserting that the federal government has preeminent authority for setting immigration policy. They did leave intact the most controversial element of Arizona's disputed law -- the mandate placed on local police to determine the immigration status of anyone detained for other violations if there is reason to suspect that person is in the country illegally -- but they ruled that taking further steps to kick undocumented persons out of the country or to keep them from seeking work or require that they carry documentation of citizenship are not powers allocated to the states.

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.

I interviewed Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer last year, and - let me put it this way - I can't think of anyone less qualified to replace Rush Limbaugh as a radio talk show host. Thoughtful, wise, a little dry and measured in his words, Justice Breyer seemed to be everything Americans should want in a judge. He betrayed no particular ideology during an hourlong conversation about the Supreme Court's role in our democracy. He politely refused to answer a question related to a case before the court.

YOU HAVE to give Vice President Dick Cheney credit. He goes hunting where the ducks are. More precisely, he spent several days in early January on a duck hunting trip alongside Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and seven others, at a private camp in southern Louisiana. Such camaraderie between a politician and a Supreme Court justice might not always raise eyebrows, but the timing of this excursion made it particularly controversial. Just three weeks earlier, the Supreme Court, with Justice Scalia's participation, had agreed to hear Mr. Cheney's appeal in a major lawsuit.

Washington. -- Now we know for sure what Clarence Thomas thinks of abortion. Actually, most of us knew when he was saying that he did not know. He was lying. It was one of several lies that put him on the bench.Justice Thomas went straight into the far-right corner of the Supreme Court, where he and Antonin Scalia have been hissing and spitting at the other justices ever since. A new rancor in the judiciary dates from Justice Scalia's arrival there. It is perhaps a benign malice, since it seems to have alienated people who might otherwise have been his allies.

The Supreme Court was right in ruling this week that video games, even ones that depict scenes of graphic violence, are protected speech under the First Amendment and that states can't pass laws restricting their sale to minors. The better approach is a voluntary rating system similar to the one that many video game manufacturers and sellers already have adopted, which is akin to the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings for violence and sexual content in movies. Yet, strongly as we support the constitutional principle at hand, we're troubled by the reasoning the court used to arrive at this conclusion.

Almost every school and university will celebrate "Constitution Day" on Sept. 18. Sen. Robert C. Byrd added an amendment to a spending bill in 2004 requiring educational institutions getting federal funding to provide programs on the document's history on the anniversary of its signing. Students will likely learn how the Constitution was written and ratified, but that is not enough. They must think about what those words mean today. Their teachers and parents should discuss with them these major approaches to constitutional interpretation: Original Intent.