A master wordsmith, Justice Antonin Scalia is without a doubt the most colorful writer on the Supreme Court. Examples of his most famous lines include:
The story is told of the elderly judge who, looking back over a long career, observes with satisfaction that, when I was young, I probably let stand some convictions that should have been overturned, and when I was old I probably set aside some that should have stood; so overall, justice was done. I sometimes think that is an appropriate analogy to this Court’s constitutional jurisprudence, which alternately creates rights that the Constitution does not contain and denies rights that it does. County of Riverside v. McLaughlin, 500 U.S. 44, 59-60 (1991).
Today’s extension of the Edwards prohibition is the latest stage of prophylaxis built upon prophylaxis, producing a veritable fairyland castle of imagined constitutional restriction upon law enforcement.
Minnick v. Mississippi, 498 U.S. 146, 166 (1990).
[N]o government official is “tempted” to place restraints on his own freedom of action, which is why Lord Acton did not say “Power tends to purify.” The Court’s temptation is in the quite opposite and more natural direction–towards systematically eliminating checks upon its own power; and it succumbs. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 981 (1992).
At a recent Federalist Society event, Justice Scalia was asked which one of his dissents was his favorite. Justice Scalia responded with a quote from Morrison v. Olson. Morrison was the case in which the Court ruled that the Ethics in Government Act did not violate the separation of power doctrine. The Ethics in Government Act empowered the Attorney General to appoint independent counsel to investigate and prosecute government officials. The lone dissenter, Justice Scalia, penned his favorite lines stating,
Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf. Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 699 (1988).
For more of Justice Scalia’s greatest dissents, check out Kevin A. Ring’s book, Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice.
Loading ...A recent SMSB post also featured t-shirts with some of Scalia’s more memorable quotes on them.
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Bluebook Rule 18 specifies how materials available in electronic formats should be cited. However, merely proving an “available at” citation does not ensure the content you are referencing will be available at the URL on a later date. In the past, printing a hard copy of the URL or saving an image of the site a PDF documents have been the preferred methods to preserve the content being referencing. Now there is a better way to ensure a website is available for future reference exactly the way it was when you made reference to it: Iterasi.
Iterasi allows you to save a complete webpage on a secure, searchable account while retaining all of the site’s dynamic content. Importantly for lawyers, it allows you to “notarize” a website, which provides verification of the authenticity of the saved page. Once Iterasi is installed, you will see the Iterasi buttons in your browser menu, allowing for one-click notarizations and easy access to all the pages you have notarized. As the Iterasi website puts it, “When a user wants to save a page, one click on the Notarize button instantly transfers the page to a secure personal account, providing a high-fidelity copy of the page, including images, forms, transactions, receipts, confirmations and personalized content.”
Unlike bookmarks and favorites, Iterasi ensures the page you saw is available for future reference long after the site content has changed. While some websites like the Internet Archive and Google Cache are able to retrieve cached pages from the internet to show you what a page looked like in the past, (See eg. Yahoo, circa 1998) there is no guarantee the page you need will be cached from the date you need it or cached at all. Notarizing a website through Iterasi ensures you will be able to save all the data on a website. Because Iterasi also retains the interactive capabilities of a website, it is a much better option than saving a webpage as a PDF document. So next time you are using a “available at” citation to an internet source, consider using an Iterasi link as additional way to ensure the content you are referencing will available whenever you need it.
Iterasi, responding to beta-tester feedback, has also implemented an automatic scheduler that allows you to schedule notarizations of websites you want to keep an eye on. You can also add notes and tags to your saved pages so that your notarized pages can be found quickly later. Saved pages can be shared through email, and Iterasi allows the recipient to see the shared webpage without logging into Iterasi.
More about Iterasi:
The one drawback of Iterasi is that currently on the Windows platform is supported, though a Mac version is scheduled to come out later this summer.
Demonstration of Iterasi:
You can sign up for Iterasi and get more information here.
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One factor that is often considered in determining a law school’s ranking is the number of scholarly articles published per year by the school’s faculty. Since larger schools have an advantage in this regard, a more equitable measure of publication rates is a comparison based on the number of papers published per full-time faculty member. This offers a better measure of how often professors are being published. For example, under the traditional measure the University of Texas would come out ahead in terms of the number of papers published, whereas University of Houston professors actually publish papers more frequently on a per capita basis.
Although the publication rate per professor is a useful tool to compare one aspect of a law school’s ranking, the measure is subject to a number of limitations. First, it does not take into account how many times the published articles were cited, a measure that focuses more on the quality of articles written rather than the quantity. Second, the publication rates per professor measure do not reflect how many professors were actually published in a given time frame. Professors who publish a large number of articles increase the overall publication rate for the whole school. For example over the last year, Antonio Gidi of University of Houston published ten articles and Bernard Black at the University of Texas published fourteen articles.
The findings are subject to the limitations of the source data. The data for the number of papers published comes from the Social Science Research Network. While the SSRN has a majority of the scholarly works published, SSRN only publishes those articles made available by the authors for publication through SSRN. SSRN data also reflects the year in which the article was first made available through SSRN, not the year which the paper was first published. For the sake of consistency, the numbers used in the full-time faculty column were based on the numbers most recently published by the ABA through lsac.org.
One final note, while the publication rates are often referred to and are commonly used as one measure in deriving law school rankings, it is important to note that at least one in depth study concluded that there is little correlation between publication or citation rates and effective teaching.
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Texas Tech University School of Law announced today that it will be hosting United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this Fall as he takes center stage for the Sandra Day O’Connor Distinguished Lecture Series. The Series, which started last year with the attendance of former United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is the result of the continuing efforts of Dean Walter Huffman and distinguished alum Mark Lanier to bring much deserved recognition to the law school.
On a related note, my thanks to Bryan Jepson for getting me a signed copy of Justice Scalia’s new book during my visit to D.C. last month.
In reponse to a 465-page lawsuit filed in his court, U.S. District Judge Roland Leighton in Tacoma, Washington had this to say regarding the lack of a ”short and plain statement showing the plaintiff [wa]s entitled to relief:”
Plaintiff has a great deal to say,
But it seems he skipped Rule 8(a).
His Complaint is too long,
Which renders it wrong,
Please re-write and re-file today.
The Seattle Times reports that the title alone covered eight pages, and it took another 18 pages just to identify the parties. The lawsuit includes 37 pages of quoted emails and a 224-page “odyssey” listing the claims for relief.
Sources: Seattle Times and ABA Journal
