Ever since Justice Scalia’s book ‘Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges’ about legal writing and advocacy which he co-wrote with Bryan A. Garner came out, I’ve read quite a few interviews with and articles about him. He’s always made me laugh.

Consider his dissenting decision in US Supreme Court case, PGA v. Martin which he didn’t think should have been brought before a court at all. While the majority held that Casey Martin, a professional golfer suffering from a degenerative circulatory condition, could use a motorized cart during tournaments under the Americans with Disabilities Act, Justice Scalia had this to say:

“It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a “fundamental” aspect of golf. Either out of humility or out of self-respect (one or the other) the Court should decline to answer this incredibly difficult and incredibly silly question. … many, indeed, consider walking to be the central feature of the game of golf—hence Mark Twain’s classic criticism of the sport: ‘a good walk spoiled’.”

More recently, speaking to the WSJ Law Blog, he referred to ‘The Merchant of Venice’ pointing out that, “[I]f you write a contract to take a pound of flesh, then obviously you take whatever blood goes with it. That’s implicit. That was terrible. But who cares! The good guy won, and the bad guy lost. And that’s basically what happens [in the press]. What we do here does not get faithfully conveyed.”

The courtroom scene in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ have always struck me as being of the ‘My Cousin Vinny’ variety: fun, easy to relate to, not difficult to understand and not entirely legally sound. However, I can’t help but wonder whether such an absurd technicality would actually have wound up defeating Shylock in Shakespeare’s play had he not been a Jew. Perhaps the Court’s acceptance of the Portia’s interpretation of the contract had less to with legal accuracy (or lack thereof) than it had to do with social acceptability and expedience.

I’m quite certain that Shakespeare’s audience would not have wanted to see a Jew ‘get the better of’ a Christian. And although I’m probably taking Justice Scalia’s comments completely out of context here, most cases, like almost all literature — not counting such books as A Hailey’s in which the nicest people always die rather pointlessly — require those who are perceived to be good or right to win. It doesn’t matter if, in reality, at worst, they are truly awful people, or if, at best, they have nothing in particular to recommend them.

Coming back to Justice Scalia though, in one of his recent interviews, he said something to the effect of ‘once you realise that good people can have bad ideas, you can get along fine with those you disagree with’. I fell in love with the thought of separating ideas from people although it’s not something which I’m particularly good at doing.