Justice Scalia Is Speaking for Just About Everybody on This One

Harvard Law and Policy Review, October 19, 2011

It was a great mistake to put routine drug offenses into the federal courts. United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia testifying before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on October 2, 2011.

As I was finishing law school in 1993 and making the job interview rounds, I found myself sitting across from a pleasant but tired and distracted federal judge who was interviewing me for a judicial clerkship. My carefully worded resume sat unmarked in front of him.

“What,” he asked me, “do you think is the biggest problem in the federal judiciary today?”

I was not ready for this question. While I was wholly prepared to expound on myriad topics related to myself – my fascinating background, my ambitious professional aspirations, my storied law review career about which the village children sang songs of praise – I had no idea “the federal judiciary” was a “thing” about which people “thought.”

I mumbled something about “finite resources” while the judge avoided making eye contact with me. As…