Discussion for article #227267
I recommend Posner’s book, Sex and Reason, to get a sense of his nimble thinking on such issues.
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So nominate Posner to the SCOTUS. Let’s see him knock down Fat Tony en banc and in real time!
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No, Posner is a University of Chicago “law and economics” conservative. Add him to the Supreme Court only if you want to overturn the New Deal.
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Judge Posner is 75 years old. No President is going to nominate someone of that age, period. He could be the greatest judge since Solomon, he would still be too old for the type of thinking that goes into Supreme Court nominations.
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I scanned for the word ‘Scalia’ in Posner’s opinion and didn’t get anything; just some legal argle-bargle.
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He’s here, he’s duplicitous…Get used to it!
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Fat Tony’s been trolled and stomped so many times on equal marriage, he’s ass up and bound to get more. And the mano a mano between these two is great spectacle.
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Reagan must have had his dementia earlier than we thought; after all, he mixed up who he was nominating to which court.
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The article notes Posner’s criticism of Scalia’s “originalism”. After the Supreme’s Heller decision, in which Scalia altered Second Amendment jurisprudence, Posner wrote an article (he turns out maybe one a week) excoriating the flimsy foundation of Scalia’s thinking. Probably won’t be invited to family weddings is my guess.
Justice Scalia is the part of the Corporate Supreme Court trying to tie religion to government. This man shows us what harm can come to our country by electing a Republican President who can put such a person as Scalia in the Corporate Supreme Court. He is an abomination to the justice system.
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duplicity. : deceptive in words or action.
I often disagree with Posner but he seems intellectually honest, perhaps the last such conservative in the country.
Scalia is a member of the Radical Catholic organization Opus Dei.
Hilarious. Scalia gets all the credit.
[Posner] said three past Supreme Court decisions in favor of gay rights — Romer v. Evans, Lawrence v. Texas and United States v. Windsor — didn’t necessarily make gay marriage a constitutional right, although he noted that Scalia had suggested otherwise.
“But Justice Scalia, in a dissenting opinion in Lawrence … joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas, thought not. He wrote that ‘principle and logic’ would require the Court, given its decision in Lawrence, to hold that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” Posner wrote for the Court.
That’s the same “reading of multiple precedents and understanding their implications” approach that Scalia (and Posner at times) have hated about the infamous “right to privacy” ruling (Griswold v Connecticut, overturning a state ban on contraception - we’ve come so very far), which William O Douglas said emanated from a reading of the case law on Amendments 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, and 14.
Interesting how staring in the face of an obviously outdated legal precedent allows for some flexible thinking. It’s almost like the Constitution, it’s… it’s…
It’s Alive!
It’s good to know that I am not the only person who’s cited Justice Antonin Scalia’s biting dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. By removing the last remaining legal justification for barring gay and lesbian couples from marrying, nothing short of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution can prevent existing bans on same-sex marriages from being struck down.
Conservatives in Congress tried exactly that in 2005, but failed to muster anywhere near the two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress required for passage.
Ironically, a similar constitutional amendment to ban interracial marriages was attempted in 1911 amid the controversy over the interracial marriage of Jack Johnson – the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champion – to his white wife, Etta Duryea. That amendment also failed to muster the two-thirds majorities required for passage, but it prompted many states – particularly in the segregated Deep South – to pass their own bans (which were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court in its landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision).
My mother was born and raised in Louisiana, one of those 16 states that outlawed interracial unions. My mother was black and my father was red – a Cherokee Indian. Yet had I been born in Louisiana in 1953 instead of New York, I would have been officially declared an illegitimate child – a bastard – by that state. I am an indirect beneficiary of the Loving v. Virginia decision, as my wife of seven years is white.
There is so much legal and historical precedent that I cannot see any way that the remaining state bans on same-sex marriages can stand.