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Hunting for Justice
Tulane is not the only university that has courted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In November, 2001—following his visit to the University of Kansas School of Law—Scalia was taken pheasant hunting with then Governor Bill Graves and former state Senate President Dick Bond. The visit and trip were arranged by the dean of the School of Law, Stephen R. McAllister [1].
Dean McAllister was also the lead attorney for two cases that had just come before the Supreme Court.
Two weeks prior to Scalia's trip, McAllister had appeared before the high court to argue the first case for Kansas, and two weeks after the trip, he appeared again to argue the second case.
Scalia, as well as the Supreme Court, sided with Kansas in both cases and in a later interview stated: "I do not think that spending time at a law school in which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could spending time with the governor of a state that had matters before the court." [1]
According to the Hon. Martin L.C. Feldman, U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Louisiana, Scalia's career has been a "paradigm of achievement" coupled with "the deepest sense of ethics." [2]
References
- Richard A. Serrano and David G. Savage, "Scalia Took Trip Set Up by Lawyer in Two Cases; Kansas visit in 2001 came within weeks of the Supreme Court hearing arguments," Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2004.
- Gwen Filosa, "Courts too powerful, federal justice says; High court's Scalia gives speech in N.O.," The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, March 10, 2004, p. A-12.
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