Seven Legal Questions 1) In his 1997 book, A Ma

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1) In his 1997 book, A Matter of Interpretation, Justice Antonin Scalia devoted only a small portion of his argument to telling the reader how he would implement his preferred methods of statutory and Constitutional interpretation. He acknowledged that the Supreme Court (and other courts) have been using for many decades methods of interpretation with which he disagreed. However, he said at p. 13 that "acknowledging evil is one thing, and embracing it is something else."

Realistically, the only way his recommended changes will be implemented would be by having a majority of Justices on the Court who share his views. At the moment he can only count on Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Clarence Thomas to adhere to his approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation, a group that Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor sometimes join.

To ease the pain of transition and to enhance the stability of the Court's judgments, Scalia would observe the doctrine of stare decisis, the binding nature of prior precedents (p. 140). Although he considers many canons of statutory interpretation as highly artificial and contrary to common sense, he would follow them where they make empirical sense (p. 28). He reassured the reader that he does not take the wording of laws so literally as to eviscerate their true meaning. On p. 24, he said he is a textualist but not "a nihilist."

Scalia acknowledged that some constitutional provisions, such as the First Amendment, must be inter

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American citizenship, the right to vote, the right to enjoy the presumption of innocence and to be convicted only on the basis of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the right of association, the right to privacy, the right to travel (domestically), the right to marry and to procreate, etc. Rights the Court has refused to acknowledge as fundamental include the right of gays to associate, the paternity rights of certain biological fathers, the right to be protected from an abusive parent, the right to a decent living and the right to an education. Robert Bork, Justice Scalia and other judicial conservatives have criticized the Court for discovering new constitutional substantive due process rights which were unknown at the time the Constitution was enacted into law. The Court has been careful to balance its protection of fundamental liberties against the requirements of social and political order. 4) In the Supreme Court case dealing with Connecticut's version of Megan's law, Connecticut Department of Public Safety v. Doe (2003), Justice David Souter in his concurring opinion said that a classification under such laws which differentiate between different classes of defendants "like all legislative choices affecting individual rig
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Approximate Word count = 2532
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

Seven Legal Questions 1) In his 1997 book, A Ma

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