Georgetown Profs to Students: Scalia a ‘Bigot’

On Tuesday, just days after Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden death, two Georgetown University Law Center professors sent out a campus-wide email blasting the Supreme Court heavyweight as a “voice of intolerance,” telling students not to revere or emulate him.

The two professors, Gary Peller and Mike Seidman, sent the email jointly as a response to a campus-wide press release issued by Dean William Treanor on behalf of the Georgetown Law community on the day of Justice Scalia’s death, according to the Young America’s Foundation, which obtained the email.

Justice Scalia was a Georgetown University graduate and often made visits to campus to meet with first-year law students, most recently in November 2015.

The release was thoughtfully crafted, apolitical, and thanked the Supreme Court Justice for his generous involvement in the campus community, noting occasions on which Justice Scalia met with students.

“Scalia was a giant in the history of the law, a brilliant jurist whose opinions and scholarship profoundly transformed the law,” said Dean William M. Treanor in a statement. “He cared passionately about the profession, about the law and about the future, and the students who were fortunate enough to hear him will never forget the experience. We will all miss him.”

Professors Peller and Seidman were disturbed that the email was attributed to the Georgetown community, because they believe the sentiments contained in the release were not reflective of the community as a whole.

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“I imagine many other faculty, students and staff, particularly people of color, women and sexual minorities, cringed at the headline and at the unmitigated praise with which the press release described a jurist that many of us believe was a defender of privilege, oppression and bigotry, one whose intellectual positions were not brilliant but simplistic and formalistic,” Peller wrote.

Seidman avoided the vitriol but only because “the norms of civility preclude criticizing public figures immediately after their death,” he said.

The email continued with scathing criticism of Justice Scalia. “He was not a legal figure to be lionized or emulated by our students. He bullied lawyers, trafficked in personal humiliation of advocates, and openly sided with the party of intolerance in the ‘culture wars’ he often invoked.”