ScaliaGate at Georgetown University

Georgetown University law professors argued whether the university should pay homage and remember U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative justice on the high court. The Washington Post reported on the controversy and obtained a copy of the law school’s public statement via e-mail:

February 13, 2016 — Georgetown Law mourns the loss of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (C’57), who died in Texas at the age of 79. “Scalia was a giant in the history of the law, a brilliant jurist whose opinions and scholarship profoundly transformed the law,” said Dean William M. Treanor in a statement.

“Like countless academics, I learned a great deal from his opinions and his scholarship. In the history of the Court, few Justices have had such influence on the way in which the law is understood. On a personal level, I am deeply grateful for his remarkably generous involvement with our community, including his frequent appearances in classes and his memorable lecture to our first year students this past November.”

Justice Scalia most recently visited the Law Center on November 16, when he delivered a 20-minute talk on education to the first-year class. His talk was followed by more than 30 minutes of responses to written student questions. How much influence do Scalia’s law clerks have on his opinions? “More than my colleagues,” the justice replied, to great laughter.

“The justice offered first-year students his insights and guidance, and he stayed with the students long after the lecture was over,” Treanor said. “He cared passionately about the profession, about the law and about the future, and the students who were fortunate enough to hear him will never forget the experience. We will all miss him.”

One law professor, Gary Peller, was critical of Scalia and said, “I imagine many other faculty, students and staff, particularly people of color, women and sexual minorities, cringed at [the] headline and at the unmitigated praise with which the press release described a jurist that many of us believe was a defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry, one whose intellectual positions were not brilliant but simplistic and formalistic.”

Randy Barnett and Nick Rosencrantz, both graduates of Georgetown Law and who lean more to the right, politically, responded to arguments like Peller’s:

“The problem is that the center of gravity of legal academia is so far to the left edge of the political spectrum that some have lost the ability to tell the difference.  Only on a faculty with just two identifiably right-of-center professors out of 125, could a professor harbor such vitriol for a conservative Justice that even Justice Ginsburg adored.  Only on a faculty this unbalanced could a professor willfully or knowingly choose to “hurt … those with affection for J. Scalia,” including countless students, just days after the Justice’s death.  If more of us were here, the impropriety of this act would have been far more obvious, but also less threatening to our students.

To suggest the appropriate response, each of us independently offered the following analogy:  What would be the reaction if either of us had sent a similarly-worded email to the entire student body, in violation of Georgetown email policy, upon the death of Justice Thurgood Marshall — saying that he was a bigot, and his “intellectual positions were not brilliant but simplistic”? Is there any doubt that the Georgetown reaction would justly be swift, dramatic, and severe?”

Peller had to clarify his remarks, which only made it clearer of his own biases:

“I am not suggesting that J. Scalia should have been criticized on the day of his death, nor that the ‘community’ should not be thankful for his willingness to meet with our students. But he was not a legal figure to be lionized or emulated by our students. He bullied lawyers, trafficked in personal humiliation of advocates, and openly sided with the party of intolerance in the ‘culture wars’ he often invoked. In my mind, he was not a giant in any good sense.”

Photo by SteveMasker

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