This kind of outcome-oriented jurisprudence is the only kind Scalia recognizes -- the techinque is known to all high school chemistry and physics students: for best results, first draw your curves, then go get your data.

Scalia can you say Magna Carta.

Nino Scalia exposed as flaming hypocrite.

But is there any news today?

davis x has it down. scalia -- more than most judges -- sees the law as a nice word game to do whatever he wants to do

(sorta like that guy ed whelan and his "ethics" org, only scalia can hurt and kill people).

ultimately scalia is a tragic cartoon character, hot-headed blowhard who in a different context, social and historical, woulda been just another hanging judge of wild west notoriety.

he, too, has a god damned shit-filled soul.

BTW, mine of 10:54 was a shot at Scalia, not Benen's choice of content. Just want to be clear about that, given the epidemic whining of late from people who don't have sense enough to go find blogs they enjoy if they can't find anything of value in the ones they're now visiting daily.

Scalia is a complete waste of a seat. He's Lex Luthors favorite for the Injustice League.

It's a cute zinger, and I have absolutely no objection to zingers, but the commenters who are taking the zinger seriously and claiming this proves Scalia is a hypocrite are out to lunch. What Scalia objects to is citing foreign law as precedent, or as persuasive legal authority; what he did in Caperton was argue, in a pointless and flashy piece of rhetoric, that the U.S. legal code isn't like the Talmud. What it actually demonstrates is that he's an idiot. To show that he's a hypocrite, you need to examine the rest of his record.

Steven above is correct, this isn't really a citation, is it?

However, although I don't know squat about this case, I'm not sure I understand what he thinks Scalia is trying to say here. To me, "Turn it over, and turn it over, for all is therein" sounds like it's about Scalia's somewhat strange ideas about language -- to the extent that I understand them, which also isn't much -- that the meaning is just in the text and doesn't really need anything else to be understood (for legal reading, that the meaning is in the law or the constitution) and that it just "means what it says" (whatever that's supposed to mean).

I remember looking at Scalia's cases when I was in law school. Scalia is very easy to read (i.e. predict).

As Rick Hasen noted, if it is old, Scalia loves it.

A very common strain that runs through his legal reasoning is if the practice or precedent is 100's or 1000's of years old, then he supports it. He would say "They have been doing it for x years, so it is ok." If he were alive at the time, he would have wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott.

If he were alive at the time and was asked to judge the case of Jephthah's daughter in fittingly, Judges 11:29-40, Scalia would have ordered the daughter be dutifully sacrificed, because it was a long time ago, they did that back then (ritual sacrifices) so it is ok.

Jephthah was an Isrealite captain and grateful to God vowed to sacrifice the first thing that came out of his house when he returned from a victorious battle. Too bad it was his daughter, but hey, a vow is a vow, never mind if you were contemplating a goat.

Scalia, of course, is on record as saying that political power comes not from the consent of the governed by is granted by God.

Small wonder he would cite not only foreign but religious -- not civil -- law to back himself up.

Shameful.

Scalia (and the rest of the soi-disant "strict constructionists" were revealed as outcome-oriented the time they interpreted Article VII (which concerns treaties) as not saying what it says it does.

Steven above is correct, this isn't really a citation, is it?

It is as a citation in exactly the same sense as any citation to foreign law is in any US case. (Well, not strictly true, as there are US laws that are explicitly contingent on the application of foreign law, and citation of the relevant foreign law or decisions related to it might be of somewhat different character in those cases, but this citation is pretty closely analogous to the one's Scalia objects to, which are either persuasive authority, illustration of tradition or broad opinion, or general maxims of interpretation, not binding legal authority.)

Do you think that Scalia is such a narrowly trained conservative and lawyer that he does not realize that that the very rules of logic he supposedly uses to apply law to events and to interpret the Constitution were actually codified by (horrors) the Greeks? That's about as foreign a precedent as you can find.

"Turn it over, and turn it over, for all is therein."

And overturn the Ninth Amendment while you're at it.

Scalia is not citing international law. He is citing "sacred text," or at least commentary on a sacred text. It's advising people to read, study, and study again the text, to keep thinking about it.

I can't figure out how that particular commentary on Scripture has anything to do with the facts or issues in the case.

I'm sorry, but this is a stupid criticism from Benen and Kamen... I'm no fan of Scalia, but he's not citing or holding by foreign law of any sort.

Just read the very next sentence in his dissent: "Divinely inspired text may contain the answers to all earthly questions, but the Due Process Clause most assuredly does not." He takes a proverb that some judges might possibly cite to defend their philosophy, and rejects it as irrelevant to the case at hand.

I do think that it's relevant that he quotes from the only volume of the Mishnah (out of 63) that contains NO LAWS. And I do wish that Scalia would internalize the rest of Mishnah Avot though. There is lots of ethical advice directed at judges in there.