The AP story about the impending retirement of Supreme Court Justice David Souter includes an extended passage about the “aggressively conservative views” of Justice Antonin Scalia. Note as well how Souter – a liberal – is described:
Of the justices who occupied the high court’s middle ground, Souter was the one most likely to challenge, in exchanges of written opinions, the aggressively conservative views of Justice Antonin Scalia.
“Souter seems more passionate about taking on Scalia and combating the novelty of Scalia’s more restrictive views,” George Washington University law professor Mary Cheh once said of him.
When writing for the court in 1994 that a state could not create a separate public school district for Hasidic Jewish children, Souter fended off a Scalia dissent in customary fashion.
“Justice Cardozo once cast the dissenter as ‘the gladiator making a last stand against the lions.’ Justice Scalia’s dissent is certainly the work of a gladiator, but he thrusts at lions of his own imagining,” Souter said.
I suspect Justice Scalia would find it amusing that a retirement story about a colleague would focus on him.
