Legal News

Leave it to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to argue that the Constitution does not, in fact, bar sex discrimination. Even though the court has said for decades that the equal-protection clause protects women (and, for that matter, men) from sex discrimination, the outspoken, controversial Scalia claimed late last week that women's equality is entirely up to the political branches. "If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex," he told an audience at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, "you have legislatures."  To anyone who has followed Justice Scalia's career, his latest provocative statement shouldn't come entirely as a surprise. It's been more than four years since he answered a reporter's question about his impartiality in religion cases with an under-the-chin hand gesture that some commentators said was a Sicilian obscenity. (A Supreme Court spokeswoman insisted the gesture was "dismissive" but not obscene.) And it's been about as long since Justice Scalia called his refusal to recuse himself from a case about Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force - after he had just gone on a duck-hunting trip with Cheney - the "proudest thing" he has done on the court. But Justice Scalia's attack on the constitutional rights of women - and of gays, whom he also brushed off - is not just his usual mouthing off. One of his colleagues on the nation's highest court, Justice Stephen Breyer, has just come out with a book called Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View, which rightly argues that the Constitution is a living document - one that the founders intended to grow over time, to keep up with new events. Justice Scalia is roaring back in defense of "originalism," his view that the Constitution is stuck in the meaning it had when it was written in the 18th century...