Reflections on Accountability and Legal Liability

OA 1034

With the recent news that a sitting Supreme Court justice was publicly displaying support for Trump’s attempted coup in the days between January 6, 2021 and Joe Biden’s inauguration, it’s time to ask: Is Samuel Alito actually worse than our very low opinion of him? Also who could have possibly known that a hard-right Reagan/Buckley conservative who has been publicly advocating for ending abortion rights since 1985 would turn out to be the ultra-right Trump/Scalia conservative who ended abortion rights in 2022? We take these questions on after a quick look at the latest low point in Rudy Guiliani’s long, steep, and often hilarious fall from grace. (N.B.: there’s so much more to talk about here than we could possibly fit into an hour, we didn’t even get to his awful decisions on the death penalty, among many other things.)

Finally, we learn the answer to last week’s T3BE question and consider the multifarious liabilities of stocking a private lake full of piranhas.

• Alito’s 1985 memo with strategies for overturning Roe v. Wade

• Alito’s 1985 job application to the Office of Legal Counsel

• Doe v. Groody, 361 F.3d 232 (3rd Cir. 2004)(Alito dissent in qualified immunity case involving strip search of a 10-year-old girl)

• A Tiger on the Court: Sam Alito ‘72 at Princeton, Princeton Alumni Weekly (March 8, 2006)

• Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads its Readers, Wall Street Journal (6/20/23) (Alito op-ed)

• Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court’s Plain-Spoken Defender, Wall Street Journal (7/28/23) (editorial drawn from 4 hours of interviews with Alito)

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