Antonin Scalia and the ‘meaning of Golf’

Antonin Scalia, the curmudgeonly conservative US Supreme Court justice who died last week, will be remembered for his "originalist" jurisprudence but perhaps also, and more fondly by friend and foe alike, for his bluntness, humour, particularly his often vicious sarcasm , and his literary style.

He did not suffer fools or foolish legal opinion gladly, and was prepared often to disparage even his colleagues on the bench – he recently mocked Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion on marriage equality, calling it “pretentious.”

One minority judgment in 2001, in particular, on the "Meaning of Golf" captures particularly well that scorn for uppity judges: he tore into the Supreme Court for requiring the Professional Golfing Association to allow golfer Casey Martin, who suffers from a rare circulatory disorder, to play golf with the aid of a golf cart instead of abiding by the "walking rule". Deploying capital letters to heighten the sarcasm, Scalia wrote:

"If one assumes . . . that the PGA TOUR has some legal obligation to play classic, Platonic golf-and if one assumes the correctness of all the other wrong turns the Court has made to get to this point – then we Justices must confront what is indeed an awesome responsibility. It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government's power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States," (US Const., Art. I, § 8, cl. 3), to decide What Is Golf.

“I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer?

“The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a ‘fundamental’ aspect of golf.

“Either out of humility or out of self-respect (one or the other) the Court should decline to answer this incredibly difficult and incredibly silly question.”

Scalia ended his opinion by calling the court’s determination “Kafkaesque,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “Animal Farm”, and quoted in conclusion from the latter : “The year was 2001, and ‘everybody was finally equal’.”

There will be no golf carts on the heavenly links.