I really must protest the paltry and even silly treatment of the Scalia–Garner event in the January 29 edition (believe it or not, on page 8B of the Metro section).
Let’s forget for the moment that it was a full house of over 1,700 at SMU’s McFarlin Auditorium and that Justice Scalia (I was merely fortunate to be onstage) received a standing ovation. And let’s forget the fact that never before in history has a Supreme Court justice coauthored one or more books with anyone, much less a Dallasite—and that this is the first coverage the paper has given our second book, which appeared last June. Not even our joint appearance on Piers Morgan received mention in my hometown newspaper. All that is probably my fault: I don’t have a publicist and never trumpet such matters.
What is especially disappointing is that Tasha Tsiaperas seriously misreported the gist of the joint presentation at SMU. She quotes me as saying, “I will tell you that my political beliefs are different from those of Justice Scalia” and reports that “Garner supports gay marriage and favors stricter gun control laws.” But she fails to follow up with the only reason that mentioning these issues or the authors’ political differences is relevant: Justice Scalia and I worked through 700 cases while writing our 600-page book and have not found a single case on which we disagree about legal interpretation. The point is that judicial textualism leads to consistent results, regardless of political bent.I found this emboldened portion of Garner's letter to be literally unbelievable. They really went 700 for 700, without a single disagreement?
Too bad they can't get married.
I thought you were going to say that either Garner and Judge Posner were in agreement about something or that Justice Scalia and Judge Posner were in agreement about something.
ReplyDeleteTo your point about the claim of agreeing on 700 cases, maybe they just looked at cases about which there is not much disagreement generally.