Thursday, October 08, 2009

Anonin Scalia goes Beat

Yes, everyone's favorite Supreme is channeling his inner Alan Ginsberg:


Well, you know, two chiefs ago, Chief Justice Burger, used to complain about the low quality of counsel. I used to have just the opposite reaction. I used to be disappointed that so many of the best minds in the country were being devoted to this enterprise.

I mean there’d be a, you know, a defense or public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?

I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.

And they appear here in the Court, I mean, even the ones who will only argue here once and will never come again. I’m usually impressed with how good they are. Sometimes you get one who’s not so good. But, no, by and large I don’t have any complaint about the quality of counsel, except maybe we’re wasting some of our best minds.



I mean really, people, is that any different than this?


I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe, just maybe, the overabundance of lawyers has something to do with the ever-increasing amount of laws being put into action. The guy is a professed Hamiltonian, a believer in more government power and increased law and flexibility of the Constitution. And he's so stupid to fail to see a connection there: more laws = a greater amount of resources needed for interpreting/prosecuting/defending legal matters. This is the type of people that get to the top in politics; corrupt or ignorant-either way it's producing the same effect.

ardyanovich said...

I doubt that the best lawyers could do anything else of use. Most likely, they'd go on and do something even more useless, like academic research or poetry.

Dan in Euroland said...

Well K. M. Murphy, Shleifer and Vishny would probably agree with Scalia's assessment.

Simon Spero said...

I was with you up to the last paragraph, which felt a bit strange.

Anonymous said...

They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom.

If this is the case, then shouldn't we want some of our best minds on the job?

Anonymous said...

I think not every lawyer's work enable others to create, sometimes could produce the opposite...Law itself often fall behind the needs and pulse of reality and future...Some "law" can even kill innovation.... The problem is that law often claim its absolutely authority, even when it is not too reasonable or well suited to complex reality.
Some lawyers, go ahead invent innovative system to counter the " old" or " bad " law.....For an example, Creative common.

Mesothelioma Lawyers said...

Just in doubt about those provocative on lawyers. This is not a helpful way if ever will lawyers just be in there selves of doing nothing but setting free and to be with it. Maybe most of those lawyers were not in capable of performing the best quality.