Scalia Disses Former Employer, University of Chicago Law School

University of Chicago Law School — where Justice Scalia once taught — has lost its edge and gone liberal. In his words:

"I don't think the University of Chicago is what it was in my time. I would not recommend it to students looking for a law school as I would have years ago. It has changed considerably and intentionally. It has lost the niche it once had as a rigorous and conservative law school."

Quoted in Abond Pallasch's Chicago Sun-Times story, Scalia says U. of C. has gone liberal. Hat tip to Mark Giangrande (DePaul) who summed it up nicely, 'Oh, the humanity of it all....." See also Brian Leiter's (Chicago) post. ("I get the sense he didn't mean it [gone liberal] as a compliment.")

And now for my Scalia story. While attending Chicago's Graduate Library School, I was a reference intern at U of C's Law School in 1979-80. One of my more exalted duties was to sort the mail every Saturday. Scalia would bop out of the freight elevator most every Saturday morning dressed in a black business suit wearing a white shirt and tie to pick up his mail. If his poor humble servant, that would be me, hadn't finished the mail (not an infrequent occurance because I was the only library staffer on duty on Saturdays), he would hunt me down and then proceed to look over my shoulder while I rummaged through the stack of letters and packages to find his mail. Being a strict constructionist, he never said anything more than "where's my mail?" or "that's mine."

How conservative was U of C Law back then? Well, there was a certain unhappiness among some faculty members when the club was integrated. The law school hired a young female law prof... [JH]