U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died

I'm not demanding that people shut up for all eternity and never criticize the opinions Scalia wrote. In this context, I think the Greenwald quote is a strawman. I've already made it clear that I disagreed with Scalia on many points.

But attacking a person on the day that he died is tasteless no matter what you think of him or her.

And I don't think there's really much to attack Justice Scalia on in terms of his personal life anyway. He was a close personal friend of the Notorious RBG, a devoted husband to one wife, Maureen, and father of 9 children.

Is that propagandistic whitewashing? No. It is not. Some people value it when politicians and judges live the life they assert publicly is the best possible life.

I don't want that life and don't agree that it's the best. But the man put his life where his mouth was.

The idea that a judge, or any Justice is just the sum of their soundbites regarding only the most highly media-ized opinions is truly preposterous.

Yes, I think Scalia came down on the wrong side of Citizens United, and also Obergefell. And there are others that I could cite where I disagree with him.

But there are many I could agree with, like Smith, where he strongly opined that the law needed a clearer use of plain language, and in fact, Scalia was one of the first on the Court to advocate plain English in legislation, contracts, and Court briefs.

I've edited hundreds of hours of video interviews with the Court on the topic of plain English in the realms, and it is clear to me that Scalia was the driving force that literally changed the Court's opinions on acceptable prose.

His influence on the language of the Court alone should win him a medal of some sort. Because this is good for everyone, not just partisans who happened to appeal to his politics.

Legal scholars and attorneys all over the country will be parsing and analyzing his jurisprudence for decades to come. There is no danger that people are going to stop thinking about the ways in which he was right or wrong.

Suggesting that people who ask to give it a day, or parse the decisions instead of the man is not misguided or dangerous. Greenwald is way off base here.

What I'm suggesting is that, like many of us, Justice Scalia was a man acting in good faith, serving his country at one of the highest levels. Regardless of how much you agree or disagree with his decisions, he was a human being and deserves a little respect.

And this is coming from someone who disagreed with him often.

The man was a human being. Perhaps wrong sometimes. Perhaps right sometimes. He does not deserve personal vitriol on the day of his death. Unless he turns out to be Hitler in disguise, I'm not sure he deserves personal attacks at all.

"The principle at stake is not peculiar to unions. It is applicable as well to associations of manufacturers, retail and wholesale trade groups, consumers' leagues, farmers' unions, religious groups, and every other association representing a segment of American life and taking an active part in our political campaigns and discussions .... It is therefore important -- vitally important -- that all channels of communication be open to [all of the above types of associations] during every election, that no point of view be restrained or barred, and that the people have access to the views of every group in the community."

Scalia's comment in CU itself is relevant here:

"The [First] Amendment is written in terms of “speech,” not speakers. Its text offers no foothold for excluding any category of speaker"

In this case, he's referring to the "category" of a corporation, which is referenced in the 1886 decision Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania:

"corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose"

which parallels the 1830 statement in Providence bank vs Billings by Chief Justice Marshall:

"The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men."

and even further back, to the 1790 case The Rev John Bracken v. The Visitors of Wm & Mary College, which was in essence about the question of whether those running the college were bound by the decisions of its original founders or whether they had the right to, collectively, make changes according to their assessment of how to best carry out the common purpose for which the college existed.

While not directly about speech, the 1819 case Dartmouth College v. Woodward establishes limits on the legislature's ability to modify private contracts, such as the charter that established Dartmouth, and a series of later decisions specified that any modification must not harm shareholders, founders, members, etc.

And Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) establishes (indirectly) that corporations are entitled to the same type of 14th amendment due-process and equal-protection rights as individuals. Basically, just because people have organized into a group doesn't mean the government can treat them worse than it would if they were not corporately organized.

However, "is readable by a machine" is not a well-defined standard, and is IMO way too strict; it's more than likely that a panel of human readers would all agree on which name is written on a ballot, without it being readable by a machine.