Thursday, July 16, 2015

That's Not An Ad Hominen, You Idiot: On Scalia’s Caustic and Damaging Prose



It’s one thing to see mainstream news media degenerate into ideological fits—but the law dean at UC-Irvine worries that his students’ legal briefs are increasingly “laced with derision and ad hominem barbs.” Why? This style is modeled by Justice Scalia, whose recent Obergefell dissent compared the majority’s legal reasoning to “fortune cookie” aphorisms. Dean Chemerinsky’s take? “Scalia’s browbeating is childish, even vain; like a harshly negative book critic, he revels in his own turns of phrase. And his attitude, just like his legal theory, affects the profession as a whole.” More here: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/07/15/law-school-dean-worries-that-scalias-sarcasm-is-spreading/

No comments: