Antonin Scalia
In this April 7, 2008 file photo, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia addresses a group of law students, lawyers and faculty members at the Roger Williams University law school in Bristol, R.I. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, File)

Biography	Issues	Fund Raising
Rivals	Supporters	Affiliations
Photos	Videos	Forums

It's a pretty good crowd for a summer Friday morning at Kennedy Center. From stage right (where else?) Justice Antonin Scalia enters.

He walks over to a stool and takes his seat with a music stand before him, a bottle of water nearby.

Scalia, unplugged? No, there's no acoustic guitar at the ready.

Instead, the conservative justice and his book-writing sidekick, Bryan Garner, are to deliver 4 1/2 hours of advice about how to make your case to judges.

"Lawyers generally are lousy writers," he says at one point, almost spitting out the words.

Before him sit nearly 1,000 lawyers and law students, many of whom paid $600 for their seats. They don't mind his comment; they've heard that one before.

In fact they've heard a lot of this before or perhaps read it in the book Scalia and Garner wrote, "Making Your Case, The Art of Persuading Judges."

Here, Scalia is the attraction.

"I always wanted to be center stage at the concert hall," he says, then adds a joke at his own expense. Friday's program, he says, "is probably the dullest act" to make it here.

The two men launch into the 115 tips that make up their book, which teams the justice that many consider the Supreme Court's best writer with an expert on legal prose.

Some of the advice would only interest a lawyer: Be sure the tribunal has jurisdiction.

But other suggestions would be useful in many fields: Know your audience, communicate clearly and concisely.

The latter prompts an aside from Scalia. "This is like 'do good and avoid evil' or 'buy low and sell high,'" he says. But then he adds how rare it is for lawyers to write or argue without getting long-winded.

He makes his own case for the art of making written arguments that judges actually will read, which he says will make those judges more likely to rule the way the lawyers want.

Scalia is known for aggressively questioning lawyers at Supreme Court argument sessions and is not above employing a bit of sarcasm from time to time.

On Friday, he is a legal curmudgeon, though quick to make a joke, urging lawyers to get to the point.

To those who use the phrase "with all due respect" when addressing a judge, Scalia advises them to drop it.

"Just say what you have to say," he says. That tidbit fits under the heading "Assume a posture of respectful intellectual equality with the bench."

Garner, the president of LawProse, Inc., has plenty of suggestions, too, about what makes for good and bad work by lawyers.

He laments the choice of lawyers for American Airlines to refer to their client as "AA" throughout a legal brief, instead of "American."

"Every judge reading that brief ... is an American," Garner says.

Talking about another case, he relates an unfortunate decision by lawyers to use the initials PMS to describe private mail systems.

Garner points out that Scalia, 72, will be given a lifetime achievement award next month by Scribes, the American Society of Legal Writers.

After the applause dies down, Scalia points out that such awards typically are given at Hollywood ceremonies to people who have never won an award for an individual performance. By the time they get the lifetime awards, he says, "they're over the hill."

Leave a comment