Roughly 20 years ago, the editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, Bryan Garner, interviewed eight of the nine sitting justices (all but the characteristically press-shy Justice David Souter) about “legal writing and advocacy.” The interviews are excellent, but – as the topic suggests – they were fairly restrained.
That has not always been the case. Below are three of the more candid (and perhaps unexpected) remarks given by justices during interviews over the years (we will feature more in future Closer Looks):
Justice John Paul Stevens
“[W]e were all lined up and they threatened to kill, to shoot everybody with a sub-machine gun,” the late Justice John Paul Stevens once remarked in a free-wheeling 2010 CBS interview, referencing his experience as a boy when gangsters invaded his family’s home in Chicago.
In a May 2019 PBS News Hour appearance, the 99-year-old Stevens elaborated on a similar anecdote he included in his book, being his father’s meeting with the infamous Al Capone. As journalist Judy Woodruff, who interviewed Stevens, explained: “Stevens writes that his father and other hotel men in the city thought it important to persuade industry groups to hold their conventions in Chicago. His father and another hotel manager ‘paid a visit to Al Capone, explained how Chicago’s hotel business might be affected if any conventioneers were robbed and asked for his help.’” “According to my father’s account,” Stevens wrote, “Capone said he understood, and, in fact, there wasn’t a single holdup in Chicago during the week of the convention.”
Stevens also recalled when his childhood home was broken into and one of his brothers almost shot a neighbor by mistake, noting that he “thought about that frequently, for the fact that these accidents can happen when there are too many guns around. And that has reminded me of reason to be opposed to the Second Amendment.”
Justice William O. Douglas
“[Robert Kennedy’s] tendency was to get into arguments with Communists trying to convince them that they were wrong – and I said, ‘Bobby, that’s whistling in the wind. You never can argue with these fellows, so why don’t we just forget about it, and spend an evening doing something else rather than wasting it trying to convert some guy who will never be converted,’” the often outspoken Justice William O. Douglas said in a 1969 interview, talking about his 1955 trip to Russia during the height of the Cold War with Robert F. Kennedy, or “Bobby” (the two were friends most of RFK’s life).
Douglas went on to discuss RFK’s pivotal 1960 decision to accept the role of attorney general in his brother, John F. Kennedy’s, incoming administration – a choice Douglas helped influence: “He crossed that bridge in my office; he decided to do it,” said Douglas. In a second interview about a month later, Douglas said he and Bobby Kennedy occasionally talked about matters outside of the Justice Department. “Bobby and I, when we met socially, would often talk about State Department problems, foreign policy questions. ‘Is the president doing the right thing? Is he doing the wrong thing? What do you think should be done about this country, that country?’”
Justice Antonin Scalia
“I’m nervous about our civic culture. I’m not sure the Internet is largely the cause of it. It’s certainly the cause of careless writing. People who get used to blurbing things on the Internet are never going to be good writers,” Justice Antonin Scalia explained in a 2013 New York Magazine interview when asked if he felt like the Internet “coarsened our culture.” “And some things I don’t understand about it. For example, I don’t know why anyone would like to be ‘friended’ on the network. I mean, what kind of a narcissistic society is it that people want to put out there, This is my life, and this is what I did yesterday? I mean … good grief. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? I think it’s strange,” continued Scalia.
In the interview, Scalia also (when asked why he hadn’t been to a State of the Union address as of late) replied that “[i]t’s childish.” “[W]e are trucked in just to give some dignity to the occasion. I mean, there are all these punch lines, and one side jumps up—Hooray! And they all cheer, and then another punch line, and the others stand up, Hooray! It is juvenile! And we have to sit there like bumps on a log. We can clap if somebody says, ‘The United States is the greatest country in the world.’ Yay! But anything else, we have to look to the chief justice. Gee, is the chief gonna clap? It didn’t used to be that bad.”
Scalia also discussed his belief in the devil, his favorite talk show host (Bill Bennett), what part of the Constitution he “found stupid” (the Ninth Amendment), and TV shows (Scalia watched one episode of Duck Dynasty).