A year earlier, Justice Scalia and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had appeared before a sold-out audience at Lisner Auditorium for a lively conversation with National Public Radio’s Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg. The justices were contrasts: Justice Scalia with his broad-shoulders and solid build, Justice Ginsburg with her tiny 5-foot frame, and both with their oftenopposing legal positions. Justice Scalia’s famous sense of humor was on display. “What’s not to like?” he said of his colleague, before adding, “except her views on the law.” But it wasn’t all about the justices’ differences. That event organized by Smithsonian Associates also revealed the depth of their friendship and the congruence of their paths and passions. Both were graduates of Harvard Law School, both served on the D.C. Circuit Court, and both were energized by verbal sparring. They also shared a love of opera. Two years earlier, almost to the day, Justice Scalia had been at Lisner, engaged in a wide-ranging discussion with Ms. Totenberg about his life and service on the court. The justice spoke about the Constitution as a living document, revisited memorable court opinions, and even detailed how he taught Justice Elena Kagan to shoot fowl. Noted for his colorful dissenting opinions, Justice Scalia maintained that the reasoning behind—not the outcome of—the high court’s decisions formed the core of U.S. law. “The outcome is here today, gone tomorrow. It affects one situation, one case. But the reasoning will affect hundreds of cases in lower courts,” he said. “So if you get the reasoning wrong, you get everything wrong, as far as I’m concerned.” During a 2013 Constitution Day celebration hosted by GW Law, Justice Scalia discussed the “immutable” quality of the Constitution. And at the Van Vleck Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition in 2009, he served as a judge. In 2002, he dedicated the new E Building at GW Law. At GW Law’s 2012 Law Review symposium, Justice Scalia’s keynote address offered a strong defense of his belief that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to the original meaning given by its framers. Prior to the symposium, the justice fielded questions from students in Professor Clark’s advanced constitutional structure class. The question-and-answer session “was an invaluable experience for my students, who received intellectually sophisticated, candid answers to a wide variety of questions,” Professor Clark says. Justice Scalia seemed to welcome interactions with GW Law students. When students in the GW Chapter of the Federalist Society expressed interest in meeting with him in 2015, he agreed to make brief remarks and take questions from them at the Supreme Court. He and his law clerks surprised another group of students by responding in the affirmative to an invitation to join them for lunch. And he served as a guest lecturer in a statutory interpretation class. “I believe [ Justice Scalia] will be remembered as one of the most consequential justices in modern history because of the force of his intellect and reasoning, and because he was a particularly effective and persuasive writer both in his majority opinions and in his dissents,” says Professor Clark. He adds: “In any event, apart from my own loss, I can’t help but feel that GW lost a friend with his passing.” 38
GW LAW | 2017
Finding Nino
HOW A GROUP OF “CHEEKY” LAW STUDENTS ENDED UP EATING LUNCH WITH JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA BY ERIK BAPTIST, JD ’04 We heard the footsteps marching toward us. Our hearts raced with anticipation as the sound of leather hitting the floor grew louder. As secondyear law students at GW Law, we had done nothing to deserve this. Yet, here we were, in the back room of the AV Ristorante Italiano in Washington, D.C., waiting for what we knew would be an unforgettable experience. Suddenly, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia entered the room, walked straight to the seat across from me, and said: “That was a cheeky thing to do. That was a really cheeky thing to do.” GW Law is not known as a bastion of conservative thought, which might explain why my classmate John and I immediately bonded during our first semester at law school. We had discovered that we shared the same views on constitutional interpretation. And when we heard that Justice Scalia was going to help dedicate GW’s newest building, we plotted how to meet him— including what we would say and who would hold the camera to photograph us with our intellectual hero. Unfortunately, when the day arrived, the venue was packed and the crowd around Justice Scalia was impassable. Before we knew it, our legal superman had left the building—along with our euphoria. But John was not to be deterred. He devised a new, far-fetched plan: We would write to the justice and invite him to lunch at his favorite Italian restaurant. “Sure, John, you can include my name in the letter,” I said, while wondering if my classmate was the most naive person within a 10-mile radius. It took John a year to execute the plan, but he finally mailed that letter on April 7, 2003, adding a couple other friends’ names. I was under stress, preparing for finals and finishing a judicial externship, when I received an email 10 days later from Professor Bradford Clark. I was also confused. I had not taken the professor’s class on the federal courts, which drew from his experience as a Supreme Court law clerk. Professor Clark’s note informed John and me that his former boss had phoned. Using his efficient “It’s Scalia” introduction, he had wanted to talk about a letter from