Scalia Tells Group What It 'Ought to Hear'

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia addresses the Northern Virginia Technology Council executives about constitutional interpretation. (By Alex Wong -- Getty Images)

The most obvious question about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's appearance before the Northern Virginia Technology Council last week was: What was he doing there?

It was answered pretty quickly, as NVTC president and chief executive Bobbie Greene Kilberg talked about neighborhood Fourth of July parties with the vast Scalia clan and mentioned that Scalia and his wife, Maureen, are her youngest child's godparents.

"Now, it's somewhat unusual for a Jewish child to have a Sicilian, Italian-American Catholic godfather, but that's the beauty of America," Kilberg told a sold-out breakfast of more than 600 members -- noting that Scalia can beautifully recite, in Hebrew, traditional Jewish prayers.

The justice added: "Bobbie and Bill wanted the best for their last child, and what could be better than a Sicilian godfather?"

Scalia himself seemed a bit surprised to be standing before the business group. "Bobbie suggested when she invited me over here that I talk about some business-related matters, " he said, and paused. "I'm not going to do that," Scalia said.

"I'm going to talk about -- not what my listeners might want to hear, but about what I think they ought to hear. That's part of my charm."

Actually, he gave it a shot. He noted that one of the primary functions of the court is to settle disputes between businesses and between business and government. He noted that the NVTC might be one group following a patent case that asks the justices to decide what is invention and what is just an obvious idea. "And I know how that one comes out, but I'm not going to tell you," he said.

But mostly Scalia talked about his favorite subject, "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution based on "the meaning it was understood to have when it was written."

The only tart moment of the morning came during the Q&A session, when one woman noted how often Scalia referred to "businessmen" during his speech; she reminded him that women have owned businesses for some time now and pointed out that the Constitution was "written by men for men."

Scalia groaned and asked whether the solution would be "to throw it out?"

For his part, Scalia said he doesn't think the Constitution needs to "evolve" to cover modern problems, although he acknowledged that it is not always easy to follow the intent of the framers from 220 years ago.

Especially "when you guys invent some new technology."

"Sometimes," he said, "you have to sort of calculate the trajectory of the Constitution."

-- Robert Barnes