November 28, 2006

It's nice to see someone in the pages of the New York Times, even if in this case an outsider (novelist Scott Turow, writing in the Sunday magazine) getting past the Halloween-scare image of Justice Scalia ordinarily fed to Times readers:

Justice Scalia, especially in the last decade, has frequently taken an expansive view of the Bill of Rights, thus supporting defendants in criminal cases. ...In all of this, Scalia is first and foremost a legal formalist — meaning that to him, the rules are the rules. ... As the Apprendi cases demonstrate, Scalia is more like the court’s liberal members in seeing the Bill of Rights as a constitutional trump when it collides with government power.