Justice Sticks by a Strict Constitution

SANTA PAULA — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia continued to champion his belief that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted literally during a private lecture Friday evening at St. Thomas Aquinas College.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 400 students and faculty members, Scalia found a receptive audience in the young, mostly Catholic, scholars who are fed a regular intellectual diet of philosophy, theology and poetry.

Nestled in the mountains between Ojai and Santa Paula, tiny St. Thomas Aquinas is one of only two liberal arts colleges in the nation devoted solely to studying the masters, including Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Chaucer.

Scalia kicked off the evening by repeating a speech he gave to a packed Los Angeles ballroom a day earlier, the essence of which focused on the dangers of broadening the scope of the Constitution.

Scalia criticized those who would seek to add new rights into the Constitution, including abortion, and asserted that the Constitution’s authors created a mandate--not a working document.

The 60-year-old justice harshly criticized the concept of a “living” Constitution, remarking sarcastically that it is not a “morphing document that takes on a different meaning from age to age.”

“This is a deep-seeded alteration in the attitude of the people toward the document,” Scalia added during an hourlong address that was funny, wry and often scathing.

Considered one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative jurists, Scalia has long been a supporter of the “original interpretation” school of constitutional analysis, and insists that the issue transcends liberal-conservative lines.

After his closing remarks Friday, Scalia opened the floor for questions from those gathered in the intimate wood-beamed lecture hall.

Asked one student: What do you think the Constitution’s authors intended the role of the high court to be?

The court and its jurists, Scalia responded, are charged with pronouncing meaning in the law as it is written.

“The Constitution is a statute,” he said. “It is a law. Lawyers and judges have to figure out the law--that is what they do.”

But what has happened, he said, is that the court has been charged with inventing all sorts of new rights.

“Allow the Supreme Court to create new rights, take away the rights of the majority,” Scalia asserted in one of his most passionate moments. “You are taking one thing after another out of the political process.”

At that point, another student agreed with Scalia and asked how the public could be made more aware of the issue. The media? The schools? she asked.

“I am not terribly optimistic,” Scalia responded. “That’s why I am here talking to this group.”

“I don’t know,” he quipped, “tell a friend.”