Justice Scalia and the Little Black Box

“I’ve always wanted someone to run a black box experiment with all the SCOTUS justices. Here’s how it would work. Take any case, X. Break it down along ideological grounds… an opinion/ruling … favored a corporation over the consumer or the other way around; or expanded/upheld/restricted civil rights; expanded/restricted government power vs citizen rights, labor vs owners etc. Now we assign Justice Scalia (or whoever) a certain profile – say, we assume that really, at bottom, Scalia is a social conservative with an authoritarian complex (for the sake of argument). … So it’s like a black box – feed Scalia on one end, and at the other end you get the ideological outcome. … A case comes up. I think to myself – “OK, how would someone rule in this case, so that they can stick it to the little guy, or favor a corporation over the consumer, or restrict civil rights, or have a negative outcome for women, gays etc.” – and then I say to myself: I put this in my magic black box, and I already know how Scalia is going to rule/opine – and darn, it, it’s right! … The black box works, folks.”

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