Justice Scalia at TCD

Today, the Hist, one of the debating societies at TCD hosted Justice Antonin Scalia, of the US Supreme Court.  A friend of mine from my program, Nicole, and I waited in line to get tickets to hear him speak last Tuesday, even at this risk of being late to statistics, though we weren't too concerned about that (we were still on time).  I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see Justice Scalia speak.

It was a very interesting, and well attended, talk, titled "Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters."  During the talk, Justice Scalia spoke about his judicial philosophy of originalism and judicial restraint, and how the concept of a "living constitution" was not appropriate for a democratic society.  He even took a few questions from the crowd, and was very good at talking off-script (perhaps Obama could learn from him about that), and made the audience break out in applause or laughter several times.  Someone asked him about how he would vote on Obamacare when it reaches the SCOTUS, but he wisely declined to answer so that the left could not use it against him and force him to recuse himself and someone else (an American) tried to bait him into answering a question about whether he would wait for Obama to be out of office before he retired, but he also chose not to answer that question.  It was a very good talk, and I was glad to have the opportunity to hear him speak.  Here is a short video that I took of some of his concluding remarks: