If John Keats is right that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”
Justice Antonin Scalia’s crafted dissent must be truer than Justice
Anthony Kennedy’s flat majority opinion. His language is sharp and
highly metaphorical as he argues that the majority opinion is
“diseased,” leading not to order and health but to a cancerous
chaos. Here are a few of his most literary lines:
The root error of the Court’s erroneous decisions, Scalia writes, is its “diseased” exaltation of its own role: “The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.” This, in turn, has caused the Court to diminish the Constitution, viewing it, Scalia writes, as “a technicality of little interest”: “The Court is eager—hungry—to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little interest to anyone but the people of We the People, who created it as a barrier against judges’ intrusion into their lives.”
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/07/01/scalias-literary-dissent
The root error of the Court’s erroneous decisions, Scalia writes, is its “diseased” exaltation of its own role: “The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.” This, in turn, has caused the Court to diminish the Constitution, viewing it, Scalia writes, as “a technicality of little interest”: “The Court is eager—hungry—to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little interest to anyone but the people of We the People, who created it as a barrier against judges’ intrusion into their lives.”
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/07/01/scalias-literary-dissent
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