Has the Court Run Amok?
The Extent to Which Scalia Is Right – and Wrong In short, this is especially an appropriate time to consider whether Scalia is right, and the Court has indeed run amok. The answer, in my view, is that he’s part right, part wrong – and also part of the problem. The part Scalia has right is that the current situation is not, as some justices would have it, business as usual in the federal judiciary, and at the Supreme Court in particular. The Supreme Court, to an unusual if not unprecedented degree, has become a political lightning rod in a storm-filled political culture. This is not merely the consequence of the Court deciding cases foisted upon it – as O’Connor and Breyer seem to have suggested. It is not accurate to say the Court has had controversy thrust upon it; rather, with its choice of which cases to review, it has, in a sense, embraced controversy and sowed division. The Court’s docket is discretionary (except for the few cases that fall, according to the Constitution, under it
