Jan Crawford interviews Justice Scalia at the Federalist Society annual dinner.

David Lat reports:

Crawford asked Scalia if he ever found himself in a situation where he was torn between his personal conscience and his professional duty as a justice. He said no. After Crawford expressed a hint of incredulity — you’ve never encountered such a situation, in your many years on the bench? — Scalia quipped, “Maybe I have a lax conscience.” The resulting laughter cleared the air nicely.

Conversation turned to whether the Supreme Court’s opinions offer adequate guidance to the lower courts and litigants — a topic recently raised in this fascinating New York Times article by Adam Liptak, which Crawford explicitly referenced. Scalia appeared to agree with the general thrust of the piece.

“You can write a fuzzy decision that gets nine votes,” Scalia said, “or a very clear decision that gets five votes.”

On the subject of putting Supreme Court oral arguments on video, Scalia said he disapproved. He thought it would mainly lead to out-of-context clips. He thought he'd look great in those clips though: "I could ham it up with the best of them on television... I’d do very well." Lat calls that boasting, but I see modesty. Best of them implies that he doesn't think he is the best oral-argument entertainer. But he is!

On the subject of attending the President's State of the Union Address, he said: “It is a juvenile spectacle, and I resent being called upon to give it dignity…. It’s really not appropriate for the justices to be there.”

On the subject of hiring clerks from Harvard and Yale law schools:

"The best minds are going to the best law schools. They might not learn anything while they’re there [laughter], but they don’t get any dumber."

I should reprise that Vonnegut quote from my 10:20 post. What if you had to argue that they do get dumber? I'll bet you could.

Lat says:

Note how Scalia did not use politically correct terminology. The PC approach calls for referring to the “highest ranked” law schools rather than the “best” law schools.

I must chide Lat for not seeing the political incorrectness of saying "the best minds." Or has Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" made "best minds" seem like a standard phrase? "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...." That's not innocuous. "Best minds" should prick up our attention and make us feel that something is not right.

Surely, the applicants that Harvard and Yale smile upon are not really our "best minds." Perhaps they are the "best minds" that are applying to law school in any given year, but I don't think even that is true. You have to do too many things right, too diligently, too early in life to hit the law school application sweet spot and get into the most selective schools. The best minds will have resisted acquiring the conventional indicia of career promise.

Come to think of it, Lat is also wrong to say that "highest ranked" is the preferred terminology for law schools. In academia, "highest ranked" implies highest ranked by U.S. News, and it is the proper thing to loathe U.S. News. It lacks the nuance to perceive the subtle qualities that make our favorite law schools so damned special.

Seriously... I think Scalia, being a good writer and speaker, simply believes that short, simple words are... best.

Clarence Thomas loves to hang out with law students "at their joints, with dead animals on the wall, and old tags... and food I can't eat."

And for law clerks he chooses "the kids I like," with "a preference for non-Ivy League law clerks," because "I'm not part of this new or faux nobility."

ADDED: The discussion of law clerks begins about 39 minutes into this video of Thomas's remarks at the University of Florida Law School. He says he thinks it's important to have diversity, and his idea is to concentrate on his circuit, the 11th Circuit. So he'll look for law students who are near the top of the class in schools in that circuit (which includes Florida).

He's explicitly scornful of the bloggers who refer to the students at the less highly ranked law schools as "TTT" or "third tier trash." It's interesting to me that he's paying attention to the blogs (and, of course, I'm not one of the bloggers who would ever use that term). He also speaks of wanting to visit law schools in his circuit. He has a touching dedication to the southeastern United States.

By the way, this talk at UF consists entirely of responses to student questions, and the questions are excellent. If you go to that 39 minute mark and watch the part about law clerks, keep going. The next question — at about 42:30 — is about natural law.

AND: The material about hanging out with law students is at about 46:30 in the video. He goes on to say "I don't dislike the professors, but I come to law schools to see the students." He doesn't like big events, and he thinks it has something to do with his desire, long ago, to be a priest. He speaks with a real passion for spending time with students.

John Roberts says: Under Rehnquist "the method of analysis and argument shifted to the more solid grounds of legal argument."

"Whether that 'seismic shift,' as Roberts described it, was a good thing is up for debate, though there's little question that Rehnquist was behind the move."

I'd like to see the whole text of that speech. Why did Roberts say that it might not be a good thing? When I first saw the quote that I put in this post title, I thought: Well, that's typical of how each side characterizes what it is doing. We're the judges who are doing real legal analysis, and those others are result-oriented and pursuing their own personal preferences and acting like a legislature. But apparently, it wasn't one of these we're-good-you're-bad remarks. It sounds as though he probably said that everyone on the Court has switched to writing opinions with carefully elaborated legal arguments, and the difference is not between the liberals and conservatives (and centrists) on the Court, but between the Court now and the Court before the Rehnquist. I was just teaching Griswold v. Connecticut the other day and thinking: They would never write this opinion this way if it came up today. It looks so carelessly slapped together by today's standards, yet you can tell by the tone that they thought they were doing a fine job.

But what was good about the old style of opinion-writing? What are we missing? Without more of the text of the speech, I can only guess at what Roberts may have said, but I'm thinking that what we miss are the opportunities for insight into what made the Justices think about things the way they did. There's an immediacy to those old cases. The reader doesn't feel that a squad of bookish law clerks has replaced all human feeling and intuition with properly scholarly verbosity. All that verbiage distances us and makes the layperson think: It certainly looks like they know what they're doing. In fact, it may be utter nonsense, but good luck figuring that out.

It's tiresome, workmanlike, and uninspiring. In such an environment, who will care much about the role of the Constitution limiting whatever it is government decides to do to us?

If Rehnquist represents something Roberts is ambivalent about, does Roberts aspire to his own seismic shift?