Thursday, February 05, 2009

Student gets scolded by Justice Scalia.

February 04, 2009

Florida Student Asks Scalia a Question -- and Gets Scolded
Where others fear to tread, a 20-year-old college student from Tequesta, Fla.,boldly stepped forward Tuesday to ask Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a question he did not like during a public appearance in West Palm Beach. "That's a nasty, impolite question," said Scalia, himself an expert on tough questioning, and he at first refused to answer it.
This morning we tracked down student Sarah Jeck, the Florida Atlantic University honors college junior who incurred Scalia's wrath, and she seemed a little stunned, but not cowed, by his reaction. "He can dish it out, but he can't take it, I guess," she says. "I'm generally a very polite person. I'm really surprised the way it turned out. It was not a preposterous question."
So what did Sarah Jeck ask that caused the volatile justice to erupt? According to her own notes and this account in today's Sun-Sentinel, Jeck asked whether the rationale for Scalia's well-known opposition to cameras in the Supreme Court was "vitiated" by the facts that the Court allows public visitors to view arguments and releases full argument transcripts to the public, and that justices go out on book tours.
It's that last part that probably grated, because Scalia could, at that precise moment, have been said to be on a book tour. He was speaking before the Palm Beach County Forum Club and Bar Association, while his book -- Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, co-authored by Bryan Garner -- was for sale at a table outside the hall.
Jeck, a political science major, is taking a judicial process class and is looking at the issue of cameras in the courts as her thesis topic. So when she learned Scalia was coming to town, it seemed like a reasonable question to her and her prof Martin Sweet. By tradition, the club invites local university students to forum events and lets them ask questions. "We knew it was a little jab, but his response was unanticipated," she says.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home