Legal News

In Talk to Students, Scalia Calls His Mastery of Shakespeare ?Significant?

By Dan Slater

The Scalia Roadshow continued yesterday when Nino took questions from a group of really smart students from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

“I am not a moralist-in-chief … (nor an) ayatollah who is supposed to tell America what its morality should be,” Scalia told the eager beaver high-achievers during the session, which was held in the Court’s ornate west conference room and televised on C-SPAN. (The video can be seen by clicking through to this USA Today story. Here’s another report from the ABA Journal.) According to the report, Scalia warned against expecting judges to solve society’s problems and recalled his own youth, which he spent with his “nose to the grindstone.”

When asked about the work of the Court, Scalia threw cold water on any notions of glamour, saying that the work isn’t as exciting as it may be conveyed by journalists. “Most of the time we are not doing the ‘pizzazz-y’ things you read about in the paper,” Scalia said. “Should there be a right to die? . . . Should there be a right to homosexual sodomy? . . . Ninety-five percent of the time, we are dealing with really dull, lawyerly stuff.”

He also commented on his opposition to cameras in High Court proceedings and in other federal courtrooms. He reportedly said he worried that networks would use short clips — “a 15-second takeout” — without context. “It would be ‘man bites dog,’” he said, suggesting that legal issues would be sensationalized. “Why should I participate in the mis-education of the American people? I just don’t think it’s worth it.”

To queries about his youth, Scalia said that, while a student at Xavier High School in Manhattan, he played the French horn, was on the junior varsity rifle team, and played Macbeth in a high school play, terming his mastery of Shakespeare’s tragedy “significant.”

To all this, the Law Blog can’t help but think of a line from the great play: “Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are . . . .”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 10, 2008 (boomark / email).