Jurisimprudence? You be the judge.

Last week Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said of the challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act now before the court,

"I think [the repeated passage of the Voting Rights Act] is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomena that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.  It's been written about.  Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes."

Yes, "it has been written about." However, a bit of digging by investigative reporters at the Baltimore Sun and the Providence Journal has revealed that the writer to whom the justice refers, may be none other than Scalia himself and an article he wrote in 1979.

If this is the case, Justice Scalia's comments constitute a blatant manipulation of the facts by a jurist set to rule on the very law about which those facts are crucial.

Even if he is referring to another writer, Mr. Scalia's comments are clearly prejudicial to the case, and he should recuse himself in order to maintain the honor and integrity of the court as an impartial arbiter of the law.

Either way, I would not be at all surprised to find Mr. Justice Scalia's picture next to the words disingenuous and duplicitous in the next edition of Webster's Dictionary.

Link to Baltimore Sun article

Link to Providence Journal article

Link to Justice Scalia's 1979 article on race