Soon he’ll be a real, living boy.
Perfect.
Geez, even German news media outlets are reporting on the Thomas thing now.
Really good long essay from Tribe* on Scalia: The Scalia Myth | Laurence H. Tribe | The New York Review of Books. It touches on many of Scalia’s decisions. Here’s one:
Yet it was the issue of free speech and its intersection with principles of equality that, in Citizens United and related cases, perhaps most called into question the claim of Justice Scalia and his devotees that they were unwavering in their fidelity to “originalist” methods. The deepest question posed by those cases was whether to understand freedom of speech as an essentially absolute, abstract barrier to all federal or state restrictions on the resources and energies devoted to political expression of whatever origin, or instead in a way that takes account of the potential for money and corporate power to distort and corrupt democracy and to undermine the ideals embodied in the core principle of one person/one vote. But that question was not one on which the text or history of the First Amendment or the Fourteenth could provide meaningful guidance, much less supply unambiguous answers, however much the justices in the Citizens United majority insisted otherwise. As I have written at length elsewhere, a great deal can be said both for and against the First Amendment perspective championed by Justice Scalia and promoted with particular vigor by Justice Kennedy, but the question cannot be settled by relying on text and history to the exclusion of political and moral theory.
*Even though I’m very angry that Tribe argued against the EPA.
Man, fuck Scalia:
Fuck Scalia.
Why would they until after he is dead to bring this out. I don’t care if he was a Supreme, stuff like this should have come out a lot sooner.
Why wouldn’t they? Bringing it out while Scalia is alive increases the risk of retribution. And accusing Scalia of racism would have no political benefit, it couldn’t get him off the court or affect its decisions. It only affects his legacy, and now is the moment for that.
Any accusations they bring up now will just be met with people saying, and rightfully so, that they’re bringing them up while Scalia isn’t able to defend himself. Who cares if you couldn’t take him off the bench? That’s not the only reason to unveil problems like this.
I just Googled Scalia racist with a custom date range of 1/1/2001 to 2/12/16 (the day before he died), and there were plenty of items popping up from before his death. Perhaps people are only paying attention to it now because of his death, the political season, and the open seat?
Making perceived racists statements is one thing. Flunking students because they’re black, I don’t recall seeing that before nor can I find it from before. Lots of comments about his stances being racists for sure.
True - “ratemyprofessor” (a website of absolute integrity, lol) was started long after Scalia left academia, so there’s not a lot to go on aside from these reports decades later. Anything’s possible. The 70’s and 80’s certainly had a lot of racism, and it likely showed up in many ways. It could also just be that he was a particularly brutal grader on anyone who disagreed with his viewpoints, and probably failed people for having “the wrong answers.” Someone who lived through all the horribly racist crap back then probably had a very different outlook on jurisprudence than he did.
I can see him being a brutal grader and unforgiving of “wrong” answers much sooner than I can see him flunking students just because they were black.
The odds of all black students failing on their own in one year strikes me as rather unlikely though.
I agree, but has that been verified? It’s attributed to one person remembering that, but in the same article there’s someone else quoted who passed his class.
Unless during that particular year, they were caught up in some movement and their ideas conflicted with his.
That would imply that all black students would act and think the same way which would be … odd.
As mentioned above, this needs verification.
Additionally, depending on the classes in question “all black students” for a particular class could be 2-3 people. Many law school classes are pretty small. Even larger classes tend to be 100 students or so. Given the uprepresentation of black students today, much less in the early 80s, you’re not necessarily talking about a lot of students.
More information is needed.
I don’t think this is Scalia being a secret racist. He was probably just a brutal professor.
There’s also this.
The academic achievement level for white students is nothing to write home about. Only 25 percent of white high-school graduates taking the 2011 ACT met its benchmarks for college readiness in all subjects for which it tests. Only 4 percent of black students were college-ready in all subjects, according to their scores on the ACT.
Black students are very poorly prepared for college, on average. You can see that in data, they fail at much higher rates, and the problem gets even worse at the graduate level. Schools are all competing for a small group of qualified minority applicants, and there simply aren’t enough to go around. As a consequence many less qualified applicants are admitted to schools where they struggle, and ultimately flunk out.
This chart does a decent job of illustrating the point. Look at the MCAT scores at the top, and then look at the selection rate by race underneath it.
We’re not doing these applicants any favors. People with bad scores are getting selected at high rates.
My first thought, though, IL is that public education was likely in better shape decades ago than it is today. So those stats may or may not be reflective of the situation when Scalia was teaching.