People who believe the Constitution would break if it didn't change with society are 'idiots,' U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says.
[...]'That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break.'
'But you would have to be an idiot to believe that,' Scalia said. 'The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things.',
I'm no legal scholar. I'll leave that up to my brother. However, it doesn't make sense to me that laws don't have to change with the times. For example, in some states, horse-thievery used to be punishable by death. The question later was whether this also applied to vehicles. Talk about some harsh justice. I'd be pissed if somebody stole my car, but I'd want money from him, not for him to die. The point is, the meaning of a law does change with time as societies change. We wouldn't sentence anyone to death for stealing a horse now, despite the fact that such was a common law 300 or even 200 years ago. If laws are passed according to the standards of one age, you cannot assume that the descendants of the same people will approve of the same standards. That's why laws must be interpreted with regard to the social norms of the day. As the Executive branch and Legislative branches are mandated to do, the Judicial branch must reflect the will of the people today.
Justice Scalia proves one thing: that despite being a very smart man, he's an idiot.
2 comments:
And once again we witness Scalia's "famous" willingness to deride other's opinions.
As I blogged about way back, the Constitution is a "living" document. It can't be anything else. Originalism if often equated with strict constructionism, but as I was explaining to Nat-Wu over lunch today, it's no coincidence that conservatives are largely originalists, and that the originalst "interpretation" of the Constitution is largely conservative. Read any of the modern conservative Supreme Court opinions, and you'll often see conservative ideology between the lines somewhere. It's not impossible to be a liberal and a strict constructionist, but you have to have very different ideas about what the framers meant than conservative strict constructionists do.
It's scary to see the direction the court is headed.
dave
Post a Comment