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Quote

25th January 2012

“It is Alito’s quarrel with Scalia’s originalist approach that is most interesting today, echoing and even amplifying his jab at oral argument in a case about violent video games last year, that “what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games.” At argument in that case, Alito went further, observing that such games represent a “new medium that cannot possibly have been envisioned when the First Amendment was ratified” and that it was “entirely artificial” to analogize the Framers’ attitudes to violent books for children to violent games. Today Alito again invokes the artifice of the Scalia approach, poking fun at his obsession with what the Framers would have done with satellites and lasers by suggesting, “It is almost impossible to think of late-18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case. (Is it possible to imagine a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach’s owner?)” Then to ratchet up the absurdity, Alito answers his own question in a footnote: The teensy constable scenario “would have required either a gigantic coach, a very tiny constable, or both—not to mention a constable with incredible fortitude and patience.”

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U.S. v. Jones: Supreme Court Justices Alito and Scalia brawl over technology and privacy. - Slate

Sam Alito is hilarious! Who knew?