Legal News

Scalia in Mississippi: Stop With the Judges, Already!

By Ashby Jones

To paraphrase some old saw about the weather in some city, if you haven’t heard a provocative comment from Justice Antonin Scalia in a while, just wait a few minutes — he’s bound to say something good.

His first provocative remarks of the new decade came on Monday, during a speech at the First Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., that was sponsored by the Mississippi College of Law. The gist of it: Scalia is concerned that there aren’t more people with varying professional backgrounds being nominated to the nation’s highest court. Click here for the story, from the Associated Press.

According to the AP, Scalia said there were three justices with no prior judicial experience when he was nominated to the court by President Ronald Reagan. Today there are none. President Obama reportedly gave consideration to DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, who doesn’t have judicial experience, but selected federal appellate court judge Sonia Sotomayor instead.

Scalia didn’t mention the Sotomayor appointment, but talked more generally about the need for this sort of diversity on the court.

“Every aspect of your career broadens your outlook and gives insights that you wouldn’t have in some other aspect of the legal practice,” Scalia said. “That’s why I think it’s good for the court to have people of varying backgrounds.”

The slight irony here, of course, is that Scalia himself was elevated to the Supreme Court from a seat on the D.C. Circuit.

Scalia said the recent trend is “leading us toward the European system,” where many judges are bureaucrats. The problem with that: those judges, in Scalia’s opinion, tend to be biased toward in favor of the government.

“Your whole life you have done nothing but be a judge and you come to think the government is always right,” he said. “Now you contrast that with the Anglo-Saxon system where, in the most important courts, the judges not only have not been spending their whole lives with their snout in the public trough, they’ve been suing the government. They’ve been defending their clients against the government. (It’s) a different mindset.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 05, 2010 (boomark / email).