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He didn't actually say that, and I'm not sure how it spread. However, he's still a terrible person, and here's the quote yours spawned from: “There is no basi

• tptacek 11y ago
  Did you know him personally, or know someone who knew him personally, or is there some other reason beyond "you profoundly disagreed with him" that would lead you to calling him a "terrible person"?
  • jbapple 11y ago
    > Did you know him personally, or know someone who knew him personally, or is there some other reason beyond "you profoundly disagreed with him" that would lead you to calling him a "terrible person"? Is there anyone you would call a terrible person? "No" is an OK answer here. Are any of them people you did not know? Again, "no" is an OK answer here. I'm not the poster you're responding to, and I'm sympathetic to the idea that it's not constructive to call someone a "terrible person", but if we are to ever call people terrible, it seems like there are some public policy actions that might be sufficiently cruel or immoral to justify calling someone a public figure who sought and used extreme power for extreme evil a "terrible person" even without having first-hand knowledge of that person's day-to-day life. Or we could limit our condemnation to their actions and advocacy, not their whole person.
    • tptacek 11y ago
      Yes, there are people I think are terrible. Yes, some of them are people I don't know. Would I say it on the day their death was announced? Tougher question. Candidly: if I felt like most of the people calling Scalia a "terrible person" were well acquainted with his work, beyond sound bites like "opposed marriage equality" or "thought we should shoot condemned convicts first and then hear their appeals", I wouldn't chide. But it seems like the more cut-and-dry an opinion you get about Scalia, the less well-informed and helpful it turns out to be.
      • orbitur 11y ago
        Being so detached from humanity and so attached to his principles that he was willing to let someone die when he had the power to decide, that alone makes him a terrible person. I'm not going to get into my other issues with him because I don't have the time right now, but even if I were completely ignorant of the other terrible things he's said both in his writing and speeches, he's still a terrible person for that statement alone.
        • tptacek 11y ago
          To what statement are you referring?
      • lawnchair_larry 11y ago
        Hah, you realize that last bit is a fancy way of saying you're being contrarian I hope.
      • dalke 11y ago
        "there are people I think are terrible" Yes, your own history say you think "49% of [laywers] are terrible" and 'The most useful shorthand is "all recruiters are terrible"', believe 'The TSA is obviously terrible' and say the US supported a 'terrible Pakastani dictator'. Here's a cut-and-dry piece by Richard A. Posner titled "The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia". Some of the choice quotes are: "OMITTING CONTRARY evidence turns out to be Scalia and Garner’s favorite rhetorical device", "Scalia and Garner are capable of reveling in absurdity", and "most professional historians reject the historical analysis in Scalia’s opinion". For one of many given examples of incoherence, while Scalia says he is a textual originalist, "the eighteenth-century concept of freedom of speech was much narrower than the modern concept, and burning cloth is not a modern technological innovation", so why did he vote "to hold a federal statute forbidding the burning of the American flag unconstitutional"? As Posner writes, "an understanding of free speech that embraces flag burning is exceedingly unoriginalist. It is the product of freewheeling Supreme Court decisions within the last century." Here's an op-ed by Erwin Chemerinsky titled "Justice Scalia: Why he's a bad influence" which starts "Justice Antonin Scalia is setting a terrible example for young lawyers. Ignore, for now, his jurisprudence, his famously strict originalism; it's his tone that's the problem." Other parts include "Such mockery does not amount to a legal argument; it's nothing more than an attack on the author's writing technique. A litigator who compared an opponent's brief to a fortune cookie likely would be, and should be, sanctioned by the court." and "Scalia's browbeating is childish, even vain; like a harshly negative book critic, he revels in his own turns of phrase. And his attitude, just like his legal theory, affects the profession as a whole." I feel more well-informed by both pieces.
  • tomp 11y ago
    So Hitler wasn't a terrible person in your opinion?
• themartorana 11y ago
  Text, tradition, and contemporary practice being far more important than justice, to Scalia.
  • tptacek 11y ago
    Text and tradition are uniquely important to the Supreme Court, whose members hold almost absolutely unaccountable lifetime appointments and the power to overrule Congress and thus shape the actions of the administration. Without rigorous traditions and principles, they're a panel of philosopher-kings. More so than in any other government position, it is possible for a Supreme Court justice to be wrong on the substance of an issue and right on the process, and even for the process to outweigh the substance if it means 10, 50, 100 future cases are handled better.
    • scrollaway 11y ago
      The HN timing is interesting what with the sci-hub story still being on the front page. It's in that very thread that there was intense (and quite correct) discussion on the difference between justice and law. Texts, traditions and principles are references. Sometimes they're wrong. Also, as a non-american I find it absolutely absurd that for a lot of people there is this fascination with "the constitution" as being this all-powerful scripture and that's what the supreme court is supposed to defend, not the more abstract aspects of morality. It's all nonsense of course - all supreme justices know exactly what kind of power they have, why they have it and how to use it ... and the constitution is really just a reference. I remember reading some of Scalia's comments (I believe on marriage equality) explaining away how the supreme court should not "redefine" etc but as another poster said, it's easy to say that when convenient and forget it when even more convenient. Those comments could be applied to just about every single case...
      • KMag 11y ago
        > Also, as a non-american I find it absolutely absurd that for a lot of people there is this fascination with "the constitution" as being this all-powerful scripture and that's what the supreme court is supposed to defend, not the more abstract aspects of morality. People have very large disagreements over what is morally right. In the American system of government, it's the role of the legislature to ensure that the laws represent some consensus of justice and morality. It's the role of the judiciary to resolve ambiguity and contradiction in those laws. If the judiciary were to rule based on their subjective views of morality, it would subvert the will of the people, as expressed in laws and constitutional amendments passed by the legislature (and legislatures of the states). The courts are courts of law instead of courts of morality or justice, largely due to interpretation of morality and justice being much more problematic and arbitrary than interpretation of laws. It's the role of the legislature, not the judiciary, to determine consensus views of justice and morality.
• angersock 11y ago
  Why is that a terrible quote? Remember, there's a reason that the process and traditions are followed. It helps provide (theoretically) a uniformity of enforcement. In the case of your quote, the exact same mechanism for "evidence found after the trial changes to innocence" is quite possibly used for "evidence found after the trial changes to guilty". It nudges up against double-jeopardy. There are other problems with such an approach.
  • sokoloff 11y ago
    The Fifth Amendment (which bars double jeopardy) is asymmetric. (I believe it is so by design and intent.) A slippery slope evidentiary argument that would tend to exonerate is not a concern that it would later be applied to retry or change to guilty a previous acquittal, IMO. The courts have been quite clear on this.
• dang 11y ago
  > he's still a terrible person The combination of incivility and internet buzzphrase is toxic for HN. Please don't do this when commenting here, regardless of how you feel about someone. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11096095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11096095 and marked it off-topic.
  • orbitur 11y ago
    I admit the phrase "terrible person" is uncivil, but where is an internet buzzphrase in my comment?
    • dang 11y ago
      "You are a terrible person" or "he is a terrible person" is the internet buzzphrase, in the same category as "you are bad and you should feel bad". I mean, I don't collect data on how often these things appear, but that's the one I was reacting to.
      • CamperBob2 11y ago
        Just on a purely objective level, isn't "terrible" a reasonable adjective to describe someone who wrote this? “There is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough), for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction.” Scalia could easily have stated that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment would apply to a case where a defendant was denied the benefit of evidence discovered after conviction. No one could possibly have argued with that reasoning, or with his right to apply it. But he didn't. A good person would have done a very different thing.
        • dang 11y ago
          To go from having written a terrible thing to being a terrible person is an enormous leap, and a catastrophic one. Indeed, if the threshold is that low, then we're all a terrible person.