NVTC Titans Breakfast: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Warns Technology Business Community That Low Salaries Will Impact the Quality of Federal J
15 December 2006
At an exclusive appearance this morning before 640 technology business leaders at the Northern Virginia Technology Council's (NVTC) Titans Breakfast co-hosted by the NVTC General Counsel Committee, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia voiced his concerns about the impact of low-paying judicial salaries on the caliber of individuals sitting on the bench. He warned that "if you don't have good courts, you won't have good law and your businesses will suffer."
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"Businessmen should be concerned [about low judicial salaries]," Scalia said. He believes that judicial salaries are about 40 percent lower in terms of today's dollars than when he first was appointed to the bench and, as a result, judges are increasingly leaving the federal bench to return to private practice. "Worse than that, more and more, we [the federal judicial system] cannot attract the really, bright successful lawyers," which adversely impacts the quality of judicial decisions, Scalia said.
Justice Scalia also spoke at length on his perspective on constitutional interpretation. He described his judicial philosophy as originalism which holds that, when interpreting the Constitution, it is essential to look at what the terms in question were understood to mean at the time they were enacted. Justice Scalia's response to detractors of originalism is that they have not been able to produce an alternative "coherent theory of interpreting the Constitution."
When asked why attorneys generally have a poor reputation today, Justice Scalia remarked that "the nature of the practice has changed a lot" and has moved from advising to litigating. Justice Scalia noted that "you like your family lawyer who writes your will. You like the lawyers who write a good contract for your company. The lawyer you hate is the lawyer who litigates against you." Today, the "average American's contact with lawyers likely is to be in litigation, which can be a gut-wrenching experience," he said. "I don't think the problem is the litigiousness of our people; I think the problem is the rules that govern litigation."
The speaker at NVTC's first Titans Breakfast of 2007 will be Jim O'Neill, President, Northrop Grumann Information Technology, on January 31 at the Hilton McLean. To learn more about upcoming Titans Breakfasts or other NVTC events, please visit http://www.nvtc.org
The Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) is the membership and trade association for the technology community in Northern Virginia and is the largest technology council in the nation. NVTC has about 1,100 member companies representing more than 188,000 employees. Its membership includes companies from all sectors of the technology industry and the service providers that support these companies, as well as universities, foreign embassies, non-profit organizations and governmental agencies. NVTC is recognized as the nation's leader in providing its technology community with networking and educational events, specialized services and benefits, public policy advocacy, branding of its region as a major global technology center, initiatives in targeted business sectors and in the international, entrepreneurship, workforce and education arenas, the Equal Footing Foundation that focuses on venture philanthropy and public/private partnerships, and The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC to mentor new technology entrepreneurs. Visit NVTC at http://www.nvtc.org.
Source: prnewswire
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