We interrupt this bail blog
to say goodbye to Justice Antonin Scalia.
I met Justice Scalia at the
Supreme Court, on a night in 1988 when the Court was holding a mini-premier of
a PBS documentary called, “This Honorable Court.” My mom was on the guest list because
she’d been a state chairperson for the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution
Commission. I lived and worked in D.C. at the time, and she got me in.
We were standing in the Great
Hall, the “lobby” of the Supreme Court, and I had made my way to a place where
I could see what was going on. Suddenly, a man sidled up next to me – smoking –
and relentlessly cracking jokes about virtually everything being said during
the ceremony. I saw who it was, and so I quickly gave up any hope of either shushing
him or telling him not to smoke. In fact, I liked his jokes, and he must have known
that I liked them, because he kept telling them for about 15 solid minutes. I
learned later that this sort of interaction was the norm for Antonin Scalia,
who lived life in the moment, and who cracked jokes like nobody else.
