Justices Free To Discuss Beliefs

Even Supreme Court justices have personal opinions. Within reason, they have a right to express them.

And that’s all Justice Antonin Scalia did the other day when he said in a speech at Catholic University’s School of Philosophy that the Constitution does not extend a right to die.

Now, with an assisted-suicide case headed to the court, several ethicists have criticized Scalia.

How are parties to that case going to feel now, Professor Geoffrey Hazard of the University of Pennsylvania Law School wondered. “I think,” he said, “they would feel that his mind is closed to them, and that is an unfortunate feeling to have when you’re going before the court.”

If Scalia’s mind is made up in the pending case, keeping his mouth shut Monday at Catholic University wouldn’t change that.

Nor would it have changed the fact that Scalia’s opinion is indelibly recorded in the concurring opinion he issued on June 25, 1990, in the case of Nancy Beth Cruzan.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Cruzan’s parents could not disconnect the feeding tubes that had kept their comatose 32-year-old daughter alive for seven years.

The court said Cruzan had a constitutional right to die but her parents hadn’t shown that she would have wanted to die had she been able to choose.

In his separate opinion, Scalia said the court should have declared that federal courts have no business interfering with states’ authority to prevent suicide.

Scalia made it clear in 1990 that he didn’t necessarily think it was desirable to keep Cruzan alive against her wishes. He said, merely, that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t speak to that issue.

Now Hazard and a handful of others want Scalia to pretend he doesn’t hold the opinion he made so conspicuously public more than six years ago.

If anything, too few judges are willing to let their opinions show. They are, after all, public servants, and the public has a legitimate interest in understanding how they think.

Obviously, judges and judicial candidates have no business bartering for office by promising how they’ll handle specific cases. Owning up to their philosophical leanings is a different matter.

All Scalia did was state - restate, in fact - an opinion everyone knew he had. If such frankness warranted any reaction, it should have been approval, not censure.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Doug Floyd/For the editorial board