Justice Antonin Scalia (1936-2016) Tribute List

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died of natural causes on February 13, 2016 at the age of 79. Scalia had served on the court since 1986, and was its conservative voice, ready with a brilliant question in oral arguments or a fierce dissenting opinion. Scalia's legal mind and his wit have long been praised even by those people who disagreed with his philosophy and although the Supreme Court is shrouded in mystery, it is said that his best friend on the court was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the Court's leading liberal voices. Here are ten vocabulary words from the opinions of Justice Antonin Scalia.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. veneer
    an ornamental coating to a building
    When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so. … Since there is no doubt whatever that the People never decided to prohibit the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples, the public debate over same-sex marriage must be allowed to continue. But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law.
    - Dissent to Obergefell v. Hodges
  2. superannuated
    too old to be useful
    You don't need a constitution to keep things up-to-date. All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. You don't like the death penalty anymore, that's fine...But that doesn't mean you cannot prohibit it. Persuade you fellow citizens it's a good idea [to prohibit it] and pass a law. That's what democracy is all about. It's not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.
    - California Lawyer Magazine May 2011
  3. autonomous
    existing as an independent entity
    If it were impossible for individual human beings (or groups of human beings) to act autonomously in effective pursuit of a common goal, the game of soccer would not exist.
    - United States v. Virginia
  4. dismal
    causing dejection
    Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as "inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.'
    Dissent to King v. Burwell
  5. aphorism
    a short pithy instructive saying
    If... I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.
    - Dissent to Obergefell v. Hodges
  6. sanctity
    the quality of being holy
    Certainly one cannot ban cross burning in the sanctity of his bedroom.
    - Comment during oral arguments in Virginia v. Black
  7. allude
    make an indirect reference to
    Ever so subtly, without even alluding to the last obstacles preserved by earlier opinions that we now push out of our path, we effectively replace the goal of a discrimination-free society with the quite imcompatible goal of proportionate representation by race and by sex in the workplace.
    Dissent to Johnson v. Transportation Agency
  8. patrician
    a person of refined upbringing and manners
    To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.
    - Dissent to Obergefell v. Hodges
  9. pretense
    the act of giving a false appearance
    Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act's limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.
    - Dissent to King v. Burwell
  10. ambiguity
    unclearness by virtue of having more than one meaning
    It would be gross understatement to say that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is not a model of clarity. It is in many important respects a model of ambiguity or indeed even self-contradiction.
    - AT&T v. Iowa
Created on Sat Feb 13 20:36:44 EST 2016 (updated Sun Feb 14 07:08:53 EST 2016)

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