Illiberal Court

SOME people simply cannot mind their manners. Jeremiah was roundly despised for proclaiming the infidelity of Israel. The little boy of Hans Christian Andersen exclaimed at the nakedness of the emperor. And Justice Antonin Scalia has the effrontery to expose the oligarchic agenda of his brethren.

Justice Scalia has long used his acerbic style to disassemble the jerry-built logic of Supreme Court opinions. In the Romer case this last term, for example, he declared that in the Court’s current view of the equal-protection clause, “our constitutional jurisprudence has achieved terminal silliness.”