Subject: RE: Responses to Dean Treanor's Press Release Regarding Justice Scalia
From: Betsy E Kuhn <[email-masked]>
To: Gary Peller <[email-masked]>, All Faculty and Staff <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 20:53:52 +0000

Dear Gary,

Thanks for this note.  I have to admit I would have preferred a headline that said Georgetown Law "remembers" Justice Scalia rather than "mourns."  My mourning has a very narrow focus:  Prof. Sue Bloch, whom I care a lot about, has lost a friend.  That is the beginning and end of my mourning.

Thanks,

Betsy Kuhn

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From: Gary Peller
Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2016 3:06 PM
To: All Faculty and Staff
Subject: Responses to Dean Treanor's Press Release Regarding Justice Scalia

Students and Staff:

After Dean Treanor issued a press release announcing that our community mourns the loss of Justice Scalia and praising him, Mike Seidman and I sent responses that are reproduced below. I've changed mine to be addressed to our entire community. I'm sending them to you now because I don't think you should be excluded from this conversation, but faculty are not permitted to communicate directly with the student body without prior authorization.

Gary Peller
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Mike Seidman to Dean Treanor and faculty:

Our norms of civility preclude criticizing public figures immediately after their death.  For now, then, all I’ll say is that I disagree with these sentiments and that expressions attributed to the “Georgetown Community” in the press release issued this evening do not reflect the views of the entire community..

Gary Peller, originally to Dean Treanor and faculty:

Dean Treanor, Staff, Students, and Colleagues:

Like Mike Seidman, I also was put-off by the invocation of the "Georgetown Community" in the press release that Dean Treanor issued Saturday. I imagine many other faculty, students and staff, particularly people of color, women and sexual minorities, cringed at 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.

I am not suggesting that J. Scalia should have been criticized on the day of his death, nor that the "community" should not be thankful for his willingness to meet with our students. But he was not a legal figure to be lionized or emulated by our students. He bullied lawyers, trafficked in personal humiliation of advocates, and openly sided with the party of intolerance in the "culture wars" he often invoked. In my mind, he was not a "giant" in any good sense.

It is tricky knowing what to say when a public figure like Scalia, or the late Robert Byrd, or other voices of intolerance, meet their death. But as an academic institution, I believe that we should be wary of contributing to the mystification of people because of the lofty official positions they achieved. I don't want to teach our students to hold someone like Scalia in reverence because he's a "Supreme Court Justice."  Our proximity to official Washington provides an opportunity to see many public officials close-up, and to learn that there is nothing special that titles bestow--even a Supreme Court Justice can be a bigot, and there is no reason to be intimidated by the purported "brilliance" that others describe because, when you have a chance to see and hear such people close-up, the empowering effect is often, as it should be, de-mystification. (I was happy to meet Warren Burger as a law student for this very reason). We should never teach our students to be obsequious to those with power.

The "Georgetown Community" could mean many things. In one sense, it is simply a legally constituted set of formal relations, and in that sense perhaps "the Dean," duly appointed by "the President," speaks for that "institution" of formal legal relations.