The latest round of the clash of the legal titans, U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and 7th Circuit Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner, is signalled by Posner's review of a new book by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner in this week's New Republic, with the subtle title, "The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia." A sample:
It is a singular embarrassment for textual originalists that the most esteemed judicial opinion in American history, Brown v. Board of Education, is nonoriginalist. In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the provision that states not deny to any person the “equal protection of the laws” meant that states—the former states of the Confederacy being the particular concern, of course—must not deny legal protection to the newly freed slaves (and to blacks more generally). In particular, states could not, without facing legal consequences, turn a blind eye to the Ku Klux Klan’s campaign of intimidation of blacks and carpetbaggers. Had the provision been thought, in 1868, to forbid racial segregation of public schools, it would not have been ratified. Yet Scalia and Garner claim that “recent research persuasively establishes that [the ruling in Brown that separate but equal is not equal] was the original understanding of the post-Civil War Amendments,” citing for this proposition a single law review article published seventeen years ago. They do not mention the powerful criticism of that article by Michael Klarman, a leading legal historian—which the author of the article they cite, Michael McConnell, is not, although he is a distinguished constitutional law professor and a former federal judge. And, ironically, McConnell based his analysis on the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which should be anathema to Scalia.
And here's Ed Whelan's NRO takedown of Posner's takedown.
Art: Overthrow of the Titans, Peter Paul Rubens, 1637
