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Scalia At Wesleyan

Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Antonin Scalia is perhaps the nation’s foremost advocate and interpreter of orginalism, a mode of constitutional interpretation. The chief business of the Supreme Court, both originalists and non-originalists will agree, lies in Constitutional interpretation, a task that no Supreme Court justice may responsibly avoid. Mr. Scalia’s views on originalism have been widely disseminated; the justice has not in the past hidden his light under a bushel basket. An address on orginalism delivered twenty three years ago at the University of Cincinnati during the William Howard Taft Constitutional Law Lecture is available to every reporter in the state at the click of a mouse. In that widely available lecture, Mr. Scalia dilates on the defects of non-orginalist interpretation. Briefly, non-orginalism binds constitutional interpretation to what has been called “the living constitution,” which is to say the constitution as interpreted by justices o...

Obama Commencing at Wesleyan

Sen. Barack Obama has now left Wesleyan, where he stood in for the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy and delivered a commencement speech . He was under an obligation not to be too political in his remarks; no one wanted Wesleyan to lose federal funds because of his appearance. Apparently, under federal regulations, a private university cannot abide political speeches from aspiring presidential candidates without risking federal funding. Obama was also obliged to say something swell about the Kennedys. These obligations naturally put a strain on political discourse. But he steered around the pilings with great agility and ended up complimenting Jack, the architect of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Bobby and Teddy. According to an AP report in the Journal Inquirer , “Barack Obama urged college graduates Sunday to ‘make us believe again’ by dedicating themselves to public service. We may disagree as Americans on certain issues and positions, but I believe we can be unified in service to a greater g...