Last week, “a 20-year-old college student from Tequesta, Fla., boldly stepped forward” during a public appearance by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to pose a question he did not like.
“That’s a nasty, impolite question,” said Scalia, himself an expert on tough questioning, and he at first refused to answer it.
Following the interchange, “Legal Times tracked down student Sarah Jeck, the Florida Atlantic University honors college junior who incurred Scalia’s wrath, and she seemed a little stunned, but not cowed, by his reaction.”
“He can dish it out, but he can’t take it, I guess,” she says. “I’m generally a very polite person. I’m really surprised the way it turned out. It was not a preposterous question.”
What was the Jeck’s question that so offenced Scalia?
Jeck asked whether the rationale for Scalia’s well-known opposition to cameras in the Supreme Court was “vitiated” by the facts that the Court allows public visitors to view arguments and releases full argument transcripts to the public, and that justices go out on book tours.
It’s that last part that probably grated, because Scalia could, at that precise moment, have been said to be on a book tour. He was speaking before the Palm Beach County Forum Club and Bar Association, while his book — “Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges,” co-authored by Bryan Garner — was for sale at a table outside the hall,
according to Tony Mauro of Law.com.
Jeck, a political science major, is taking a judicial process class and is looking at the issue of cameras in the courts as her thesis topic. So when she learned Scalia was coming to town, it seemed like a reasonable question to her and her professor, Martin Sweet. By tradition, the club invites local university students to forum events and lets them ask questions. “We knew it was a little jab, but his response was unanticipated,” she says.
Antonin Scalia, is considered the Court’s most “colorful jurist today,” according to Oyez, the Supreme Court Media Site.
Oftentimes, Scalia is considered both controversial and combative, and while Court observers do not deny his immense “legal brilliance and intellectual abilities,” a Supreme Court observer “once noted that if the mind were muscle and Court sessions were televised, Scalia would be the Arnold Schwartzenegger of American jurisprudence.”
One Supreme Court litigator even described Scalia’s actions as those of a big cat batting around a ball of yarn, according to Oyez.
More about Sarah Jeck, why she pursued this line of questioning, and Scalia’s response below the fold.
After Scalia made his comment to Jeck, he took several written questions and then circled back to Jeck’s query, according to this story in the Palm Beach Post. Scalia said he originally supported the idea of camera access in the courts, but came to oppose it because the inevitable “30-second takeouts” would not give a true picture of what is going on. “Why should I be a party to the miseducation of the American people?” According to Jeck, Scalia made no reference to his book tour as a possible contradiction to his views on public access to the Court.
Sweet, Jeck’s professor and pre-law adviser, told us Wednesday he is “incredibly proud” of her questioning and demeanor. “It was certainly a pointed question, but not designed to be impolite or nasty,” said Sweet, a Supreme Court scholar in his own right. “The point of learning is not to stroke somebody’s ego.”
We asked Jeck two more questions in our brief phone interview Wednesday morning. First, is she planning to go to law school? “Yes,” she said without hesitation. And second, did she buy Scalia’s book? Just as definitively, she said, “I’m a college student. I don’t have $30.”
To me, it sounds like this gutsy and bright young woman will become an attorney who knows how to hold her own, I sure hope she is interested in public service.
