by Joseph DeMaio, ©2023
(Jan. 11, 2023) — Emory University law “professor” Darren Hutchinson recently slandered late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as being “basically a Klansman.”
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley accurately points out, Hutchinson’s ad hominem attack on Justice Scalia is based on the mistaken belief that Scalia was the author of a case that Hutchinson doesn’t like.
Specifically, Hutchinson’s slander is based on the erroneous belief that Justice Scalia was the author of the majority opinion in McClesky v. Kemp, a capital murder case which involved the use of a criminal statistical study analyzing race as a factor in sentencing, which Justice Lewis Powell rejected in the opinion he – not Justice Scalia – wrote. Justice Scalia, along with Chief Justice Rehnquist and Associate Justices O’Connor and White, merely concurred in the opinion… again, authored by Justice Powell.
One is tempted to ask: does Darren (“No-neck” Hutchinson think that Brandon the Goof is also “basically a Klansman” because he considered Senator Robert (“KKK”) Byrd – Exalted Cyclops of the Sophia, West Virginia KKK – to be his “friend,” “mentor” and “guide”? Hutchinson’s character assassination of a deceased Supreme Court Justice gives new meaning to the term “classless.” And dumb.
Moreover, given the motto of the institution where he “works,” – “Cor prudentis possidebit scientiam (“The wise heart seeks knowledge”) – he might want to bone up on who, exactly, wrote the opinion in the Kemp case before he attacks a different, deceased Supreme Court Justice. Yikes.
Finally, there is a particularly biting and generally unfair saying regarding workforce characteristics and teachers: “Those who can…, do; those who can’t…, teach.” While that is an unfair assessment of teachers as a general category, in this case, it is plainly not unfair.