Was Antonin Scalia a ‘son of Georgetown’ or a ‘defender of bigotry’?
Our President and university faculty have clashed over how to remember the alum
Georgetown faculty have divided opinion in their reactions to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (C’57).
The university’s President John Degioia called him a “Son of Georgetown” by guiding his work through the teachings of Jesuit and Catholic education.
Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor was also quick to praise the work and highlight his transcendence by calling him a “giant in the history of law… who has transformed the law.”
But on Tuesday afternoon a campus wide email was sent presenting a very different memorial for Scalia.
The email, sent by professors Mike Seidman and Gary Peller, encouraged students not to “lionize or emulate” his legal persona as he was “a voice of intolerance; a defender of bigotry.”
The email was circulated as a response to a press release from Dean William Treanor where he said Scalia: “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.”
But professors Seidman and Peller pointed out: “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.”