Justice Scalia
February 17 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, US ConstitutionI respect him greatly.
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WSJ 2/16/2016
From a Sept. 7, 1999, Journal op-ed by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Feb. 13 at age 79, on the most significant development in the law over the past millennium: My selection of democratic self-government as development of the millennium assumes— perhaps optimistically— a continuing appreciation of the need for these structural checks. It also assumes, as the precondition for that appreciation, what our Framers would have called a liberal disposition on the part of the people: a reluctance to impose their views by law in the face of significant opposition, a reticence to require others to love all that they love and to hate all that they hate. A society that feels passionately about everything, or that lightly—without a sure and certain need—adopts laws obnoxious to many of its members, cannot sustain democratic self-government, and is fit only to be ruled by others.
The point was put well by the great Learned Hand, in his comments to a group of newly naturalized Americans: “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.”
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