Justice Antonin Scalia, R.I.P.

Justice Antonin Gregory Scalia's First Amendment and Sixth Amendment decisions were mostly correct, and protected human rights, Citizens United being a major exception and the Court's decision in Bush v. Gore an abortion that slammed the door on 2000 Florida recounts.

Twice he voted that flag burning was constitutionally protected activity, each time providing the swing vote in 5-4 decisions, even though he found it offensive.

He was a wit with a great vocabulary, and liberal justices loved him and hung out with him.

Nino was a fellow Georgetown University graduate (the Roman Catholic Harvard), and he will be missed. As Professor Bruce Allen Murphy of Lafeyette College wrote in The New York Times, "In terms of sheer brilliance, argumentation, extroversion, outspokenness and occasional truculent, we almost certainly never see a justice like Antonin Scalia again."

Like me, Scalia was an only child raised to believe that he could change the world, and he did.

In 1974, Scalia and Richard Cheney procured President Ford's veto of the Freedom of Information Act. I was proud to carry Senator Ted Kenedy's press releases on the successful veto override to three Senate press galleries. Later, I used FOIA to win declassification of the largest mercury pollution event in world history in 1983 as editor of the Appalachian Observer (4.2 million pounds of mercury "lost" at Union Carbide's Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant).

In 1986, I watched the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Scalia with chagrin; he was confirmed, 98-0.

In February 1989, I helped talk my mentor, U.S. Department of Labor Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahum Litt, out of confronting Scalia about abortion rights at an American Bar Association meeting in Denver, Colorado: he was going to tell his old friend "Nino" that if abortion were outlawed, he could afford to pay for his daughter to go to London for one, but what about a poor child in North Dakota?

In Octiber 1995, Congress listened to my mentor Nahum Litt, abolishing the Administrative Conference of the United States, which ceased to exist from 1995-2010. ACUS became "the Heritage Foundation metastasized," in Judge Litt's words, issuing biased, pro-corporate, pro-Big Government ukases to gut FOIA, gut Sunshine and inflict cramdown arbitration, mediation and alternative dispute resolution on litigants. I was proud to have helped Judge Litt in that effort, writing a 1989 Common Cause article. The abolition of ACUS was over vehement objections of two sitting Supreme Court justices, former ACUS Chair Antonin Scalia and ACUS member Stephen Breyer. Former ACUS Chair Marshall J. Breger, Department of Labor Solicitor, never got a federal judgeship owing to ACUS' cruelly unfair gamesmanship, dominated by 66 government lawyers, 33 corporate lawyers, and one token liberal (Alan Morrison of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen Litigation Group).

In 2001, President Bush named one of Scalia's nine offspring, corporate anti-labor lawyer Eugene Scalia, to be the top lawyer (Solicitor of the moribund United States Department of Labor), where I had my first employment after law school as law clerk for Judge Charles P. Rippey and Chief Judge Nahum Litt.

I was proud to have helped inspire the Senate not to confirm him; he had never once represented a worker in his life. Yet as Acting Solicitor, Eugene Scalia did something good: he was the first Solicitor to use a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to win reinstatement for a worker.