repeats. From the paper.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a dissent from 2009:

“This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

Scalia says this because the Constitution refers to due “process” not to outcome.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The letter and the spirit of the law. The phrase itself undermines the claims of naturalist epistemology. What is judging? Who’s to judge? Here we get back to the relation of art and law and of abstraction to representation.

On the letter of the law Scalia is correct. To argue from the spirit of law or language is subjectivism, and subjectivism is inarticulate, in-formal, isolate: the end of the social. But to argue only from the letter is cold, inhuman, unjust:

“He’s just a boy! He didn’t mean it! It was an accident! He’s my son!”
“Okay Let him go.”

“He’s just a boy! He didn’t mean it! It was an accident! He’s my son!”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s the law.”

Does it matter that he killed five people? Who’s to judge?

Formal logic in the world of experience is pedantry, and military pedantry in civic life is fascism. Pedantry will always become hypocrisy. Policemen enforcing law will always tend to identify themselves not with its enforcement but its embodiment. “I am the law.” And by identifying themselves with law the laws’ authority will become theirs. “St Paul says: To the pure all things are pure.” [Titus 1:15] That’s the pull of the short circuit, of identification.

The puffing moralist Corey Robin says Scalia was like Trump.
Last night Trump, not for the first time, said Bush lied about Iraq.

Trump has a good time playing to Scalia's audience while laughing at them.
A few people have compared him to Buchanan.

I haven't put anything in the paper about Gödel and Addington. It belongs with the above.

A commenter at Leiter linked the video. Scalia was an Authoritarian Catholic, and far from a brilliant example of the type.


"[T]he issue was simply whether carbon was an environmental pollutant or not, and I did not think that it was ever regarded as that. It is not the Atmospheric Protection Agency it's the Environmental Protection Agency. And it has always been thought to have authority only to control the environment and not outer space."