“The vast majority of inmates most generously rewarded by the release order—the 46,000 whose incarceration will be ended—do not form part of any aggrieved class even under the Court’s expansive notion of constitutional violation. Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness; and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.”

Scalia in his dissent to Brown v. Plata, using a punchline instead of an argument. [1]

Lawyers, Guns & Money:

“Some law professors and even a larger number of journalists praised Scalia for his literary style. That style isn’t as distinctive as it seems at first. Certainly it’s distinctive among Supreme Court justices. But everyone has heard Scalia’s style. It’s the sound bite style of Crossfire, highly quotable, reducing complex issues to simple—and often misleading—phrases.”
— Mark Tushnet, A Court Divided.

Worth considering the way a certain kind of linguistic dexterity can let you be lazy, because fewer people notice. It’s easy to think about this as the hoary old rhetoric v. substance line, painted artifice set against simply stated truth, and that’s not quite what I mean, or at least that’s not where I want to sit with this.

I’m thinking about the corner you paint yourself into when you write something that sounds good, that has the ring of a good sentence, but that you don’t quite believe — the sound is imperceptibly hollow, a little duller, brass for gold. How sometimes you look at it for a moment and wonder about picking it apart again and think that it fits together too well to bother changing.

I think talent, like a purely mechanical facility for words, requires radical discontent to keep it from falling asleep on itself, facility collapsing into facile.

Edward M. Bernstein knows: “Oh yes, there’s nothing like being able to write. Being able to write is a remarkable gift. There’s none better, if you can also think.”

Helen DeWitt, in The Last Samurai:

A clever man so rarely
Needs to think
He gets out of the habit.

_____________________

[1] Full text of Scalia’s dissent (joined by Thomas, natch. Alito & Roberts released a parallel non-clown dissent that used ostensibly more moderate language while reaching exactly the same conclusions).
[2] “Justices, 5-4, Tell California to Cut Prison Population,” New York Times.
[3] Scott Lemieux at the American Prospect.