ARTICLES

Where Were the Police?

Barbarians in Balboa Park

An angry mob chased U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to his car January 23 after disrupting a speech he gave to several hundred lawyers, judges, professors and students inside the House of Hospitality in Balboa Park. Scalia came to San Diego at the invitation of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

During his speech, protesters in the hall outside the ballroom held signs that said "Shame on the Court" and "Scalia is a crook." They chanted "Every vote counts" and "Shame on you" so loudly that "at one point Scalia suggested the ballroom doors be closed," according to an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

East County attorney Bill Trask, a 1994 graduate of Thomas Jefferson who was inside the ballroom, described the scene: "There were people outside the entire time chanting and pounding on the doors and just being obnoxious. I didn't see anything in terms of police or secret service inside; everyone on the stage appeared to be professors.

"Scalia talked about his perspective on Constitution," said Trask. "His position is that if something is not in the text of the Constitution, it's not in the Constitution. If a right is not there, we can't just make it up and put it there. He said we've gone down this road for the past 35 years of making up rights and putting things into the Constitution that can't be found in the text that are based on the wants and desires of our culture.

"In the case of Roe v Wade and its progeny, he would not rely on precedent because he feels it was improperly determined in the first place and is not so woven into our legal system that it would not be catastrophic to overturn it."

(Film clips can be viewed at http://216.247.170.88/scalia/scalia.htm.

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