Mother Jones, of all places, has an article deriding the writing ability of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and praising the prose of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In addition to quoting from some particularly painful opinions, the article cites a Wall Street Journal report that Sotomayor nearly flunked out of Princeton her freshman year because of her trouble putting it down on paper. This doesn't exactly disqualify her from the Supreme Court, but it does make her boring--at least in my book. Mother Jones jokes that reading Sotomayor's Riverkeeper opinion, ironically overturned by Antonin Scalia, "might be good punishment for law students who show up late for class." The article notes that Scalia's opinions are cited in Constitutional law casebooks more than any other justice. He is probably the most widely cited jurist at FlynnFiles too, as just this past Monday his biting dissent in Stenberg v. Carhart was quoted from here: "I am optimistic enough to believe that, one day, Stenberg v. Carhart will be assigned its rightful place in the history of this Court's jurisprudence beside Korematsu and Dred Scott." Somebody taught the man not to bury the lede.
"The conservative justice is the master of the wicked one-liner and, while something of a smart aleck, he influences the public debate on so many issues because of his writing ”whether he's in the majority or dissenting and whether he's right or wrong."
Dan, this describes why I read your books and blog. Your words are drops of wit in a sea of witlessness, a kind of salvation from sinful syntax.
Anyway, about the article...
It lauds Scalia's concise, simple prose and derides Sotomayor's convoluted and serpentine palaver. That furthers my little Scalia/Flynn ana-logy. Anyone who reads this blog knows about the wicked one-liners. The one about socialists hating fellow socialist George Bush more than they've ever hated another socialist takes the cake. "If America is an imperial power, where is our empire (...something like that, from WTLHA)" comes to mind as well. Talk about wicked. Perhaps Dan is guilty of sinful syntax after all.
