Academic

Justice Scalia on tough questioning: "Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the Constitution?"  I've been wondering - been wondering about this ever since "WMDs" somehow turned into a shorthand for "WMDs that could be potentially used outside of 300 miles from Baghdad" - what the logical move is for this kind of statement.  Is this the .00001% doctrine - and a claim that a B>PL?  Or a claim that we're on a slippery slope, and that the justifiable but unlikely means that everything else like it is potentially justifiable as well?  Someone better ask Eugene Volokh.

Justice Scalia, btw, seems to think it's the latter: "It would be absurd to say you couldn?t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we?re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?"