Antonin Scalia Quotes
Certainly one cannot ban cross burning in the sanctity of his bedroom.
Scalia, Antonin. Oral argument. Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, Supreme Court of the United States, 11 Dec. 2002.
Responding to George W. Bush's call for a constitutional amendment to make burning of the American flag illegal:
The 1st Amendment is almost absolute in its protection of speech. However, ironically the Untied States has much less internecine conflict with minorities better off than the nations where hate speech is illegal and criminal.
The Nazis were banned from demonstrating in the streets of Skokie, Illinois on the grounds that they would incite violence. However, Goldberger of the ACLU took their case and won their right to spew their hatred before the Supreme Court.
Striking down a law making cross burning a crime:
In 1974 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was investigating the wiretapping of American citizens. An FBI witness, Bernard Wells, testified that the wiretaps had demonstrated no disloyalty but they had identified some "loose talk:"
In this case, the Supreme Court held that burning or desecrating the American flag may not be prohibited or criminalized by the government. Flag burning, they ruled, is symbolic speech and is protected by the 1st amendment just like political pamphlets.
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the Supreme Court's history. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 by President Donald Trump, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
