Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Friday, Oct. 24, 2003

Speaking Thursday to about 800 guests at the 50th anniversary dinner of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the respected jurist faulted many academic “experts” on constitutional law for ignorance and for attitudes he considers uninformed and arrogant. What’s more, he despairs that many in academia and the judiciary, including some of his colleagues on the high court, are following such wrongheaded legal interpretations.

Under theories that turn the Constitution and the law on their heads, the justice declared, “We are free to follow our own wishes confident that nothing is thereby lost since we are, after all, the wisest and most virtuous Americans that have ever drawn breath.”

We live in an era, Scalia said, when “the Constitution means whatever our generation, or at least the Supreme Court of our generation, thinks it ought to be.”

Such rampant ignorance of the very foundations of our nation reminds the justice of Thomas Jefferson’s comment, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Scalia, who as a college student once received a fellowship from ISI, said the organization’s educational approach had been marked “by a special concern for an historical understanding of our constitutional traditions, conveying to students the contemporary elements of what [the late scholar and author] Russell Kirk called ‘the roots of American order.’”

Sadly, the justice told his audience, such an approach “flies in the face of the dominant intellectual prejudice of our age.”

Most of today’s so-called “experts on the Constitution,” he said, “take the view that the document written in Philadelphia in 1787 was simply an early attempt at the construction of what is called the liberal political order.”

All the law student these days needs to do, he said, is “read up on the latest academic understanding of political theory” and put it into constitutional text, “claiming in effect that this is what the Framers would have intended had they been so fortunate as to be alive today.”

The justice again criticized the majority of his colleagues on the Supreme Court for their decision legalizing gay sex. He noted that suddenly “what had been a criminal offense at the time of the founding and 200 years thereafter” was now “a constitutional right.”

Scalia added that ignorance of constitutional law on the part of many law students (only 5 percent in a recent survey had read “The Federalist Papers”) is “a catastrophe for this country.”

In his view, there is too much emphasis on the Bill of Rights (an “afterthought”) and too little understanding of the “real Constitution,” with its checks and balances between the “co-equal branches” of government and between the federal government and the states.

ISI President T. Kenneth Cribb Jr. announced the organization was launching a Center for the Study of American Civic Literacy “to strengthen civic education and assemble concrete evidence on the extent to which college students learn about our history and institutions.” This is a forthright effort to counter the dominant campus manta that “Western culture’s got to go” because it was, after all, created by “dead white males.”

President Bush greeted the attendees with a brief video talk in which he praised the institute for its belief that “each man’s soul is unique and priceless” and that “the market economy” is essential to that ethic.

The ISI’s Lifetime Achievement Award went to the organization’s first president, and for decades an icon of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr. He reminisced over the long road traveled by intellectual conservatism since his blockbuster expose of 1950, “God and Man at Yale.” That book created a firestorm of left-wing denunciation when it was released.

Others addressing the dinner were Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa. (who led the Pledge of Allegiance), Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, and (by video) former Attorney General Edwin Meese.

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