Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at the podium in JCU's DeCarlo Varsity CenterUS Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia "held court" in the Tony DeCarlo Varsity Center for nearly two hours yesterday evening (Mar 18), demonstrating why he is known as a strict interpreter of the Constitution.

"The Constitution says what it says," he said, asserting it has the same meaning now that it had when it was written. Where the meaning is difficult to determine, Scalia continued, the Constitution should be interpreted according to the established practices of the American people. If changing conditions require the Constitution to be changed, there is an amendment process.

Scalia described his approach to the law with "the Shakespearean principle," recalling the response of his English teacher at Xavier High School in Trenton (NJ), Father Tom Matthews, to a cocky fellow student who had offered a negative criticism of Hamlet. "When you read Shakespeare," the Jesuit remonstrated, "Shakespeare is not on trial. You are." In the same perspective, to Scalia, who went on to Georgetown and Harvard, are longstanding constitutional issues to the jurist: "He does not judge them, but is judged by them," he said, adding, "It's fair to say that accepted traditions are not just the criteria by which judicial rulings are judged by, but are even the raw material from which judicial rules ought to be derived."

Instead, there is a tendency to resort to "judicial abstractions," Scalia said. "I don't know what it is ... that causes us to cling to certain legal abstractions long after our opinions have demonstrated them to be false." As an example he said it is generally claimed that warrantless searches are unlawful, despite the demonstrated fact that this generally applies to certain cases such as the search of a home.

As a "subtext" to his remarks -- and an analogy to "legal abstractions" -- Scalia quoted a statement by 1960 presidential candidate John F. Kennedy that became a campaign theme: "Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?' Other men dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" They may seem like "words to live by," Scalia said, but he cautioned that the line was a "knockoff" from a play by George Barnard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah," spoken by the serpent and addressed to a woman named, "Eve."

In a lengthy session following his prepared address, Scalia received questions from the audience, giving his interrogators a feeling for what it must be like to plea a case before the court on which he sits. More than one received a sharp glance and equally sharp rejoinder on issues such as abortion … "You're preaching to the choir," Scalia interrupted, noting that his views on abortion are clear in his dissents and other writings. "How responsible do I feel? I did my best to overturn it. I fell short"… segregation … "I thought we fought the bloodiest war we ever had about segregation" … and capital punishment … "I do not believe that in this country the application of capital punishment is arbitrary and capricious. If it were, my colleagues and I would be reversing an awful lot (of the capital punishment verdicts) and we confirm about 95 percent of them."

Scalia even dispatched a "softball" about the influence on his judgments of his Catholic faith ("As far as I know the only commandment I apply from the bench is 'Thou Shall not Lie.' I read the text and I figure out the fairest meaning of the text.") and his Italian heritage ("I probably write a little more floridly than some non-Italian jurists.")

Indeed, the most approving response may have been the one he gave a lone heckler who interrupted the Justice almost at the beginning of his formal remarks. "Good point," he replied to the man's shouts as the latter was removed from the DeCarlo Center.

But it was in response to a final question about Congressional review of Federal judicial nominations that Scalia became as animated as he had been during the previous two hours. Calling the situation "terrible," he declared "We no longer select our judges based on whether they are good lawyers or not, but whether they agree with us, whether they will read the rights into the Constitution that we want." Making it clear how much he disapproved of the practice as it applied to abortion or anything else, he warned that the trend would lead to interpretation of law “by the majority.”

"And that's exactly what the Bill of Rights was intended to protect -- the individual FROM the majority." Shaking his head, he concluded, "This is a whole other speech," and sat down to thunderous applause from the capacity crowd of 2,000. (The event was also carried on closed circuit televion throughout the JCU campus, however the justice's staff declined permission for any broadcast or streaming over the website.)