I’ve enjoyed reading about Fordham university law professor, Joel Reidenberg‘s recent class assignment. Basically, Justice Scalia recently scoffed at privacy protections on the internet. So Reidenberg had has class gather a bunch of information about Scalia and send the 15-page dossier to Scalia himself. “Among its contents are Nino’s home address, his home phone number, [his home value], the movies he likes, his food preferences, his wife’s personal e-mail address, and photos of his lovely grandchildren.” Scalia flipped out. Others have thought through this exchange better than I, and Reidenberg has responded to Scalia. Odd that Scalia thinks privacy protections are “silly” and yet loses it when someone accesses public data about him.
scatterplot 
Five years ago, an NYU Law student asked Scalia (who was giving a talk on campus) whether he sodomizes his wife — Scalia believing that the government has every right to ask such questions of the student, who’s gay. So this is nothing new to Scalia, though predictably, he flips out every time (as did the NYU Law administration in that instance).
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I totally forgot about this. You can see an explanation for why the student did this here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050502/berndt
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You could not have come up with a better title for this post. This is, indeed, classic.
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I don’t agree with Scalia, but I don’t think he “flipped out” or “lost it” in response to the dossier. All he said was this was legal but showed very poor judgment. This is a pretty mild retort by any standard, but especially in view of the sharp tone of many of his dissents.
I also don’t think it’s true that he “lost it” in response to the question about whether he sodomizes his wife. From an eye witness account, it looks like he just paused and said he’s not going to answer that, and moved onto the next question. Even though the person kept asking the question over and over again, the eyewitness account only indicated that he just kept trying to go on to the next question. He then answered other questions for another half hour. I wouldn’t say that’s losing it at all — that’s just about the most coolheaded response I could imagine.
http://underneaththeirrobes.blogs.com/main/2005/04/judicial_sighta_3.html
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