When Decorum Is Entirely Innapropriate

It’s hard to find the words to introduce Eric Berndt‘s open letter to his NYU Law School classmates. The Nation said the following:

Justice Antonin Scalia got more than he bargained for when he accepted the NYU Annual Survey of American Law’s invitation to engage students in a Q&A session. Randomly selected to attend the limited-seating and closed-to-the-press event, NYU law school student Eric Berndt asked Scalia to explain his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and struck down the nation’s sodomy laws. Not satisfied with Scalia’s answer, Berndt asked the Justice, “Do you sodomize your wife?” Scalia demurred and law school administrators promptly turned off Berndt’s microphone. As Berndt explains in his post to fellow law school students, it was an entirely fair question to pose to a Justice whose opinion–had it been in the majority — would have allowed the state to ask that same question to thousands of gays and lesbians, and to punish them if the answer is yes.

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