Scalia, Lawyers Went Hunting
While Cases Were Pending
By Richard A. Serrano and David G. Savage
L.A. Times Staff Writers
February 26, 2004
WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the guest of a Kansas
law school two years ago and went pheasant hunting on a trip arranged by the
school's dean, all within weeks of hearing two cases in which the dean was a
lead attorney.
The cases involved issues of public policy important to Kansas officials.
Accompanying Scalia on the November 2001 hunting trip were the Kansas governor
and the recently retired state Senate president, who flew with Scalia to the
hunting camp aboard a state plane.
Two weeks before the trip, University of Kansas School of Law Dean Stephen R.
McAllister, along with the state's attorney general, had appeared before the
Supreme Court to defend a Kansas law to confine sex offenders after they
complete their prison terms.
Two weeks after the trip, the dean was before the high court to lead the state's
defense of a Kansas prison program for treating sex criminals.
Scalia was hosted by McAllister, who also served as Kansas state solicitor, when
he visited the law school to speak to students. At Scalia's request, McAllister
arranged for the justice to go pheasant hunting after the law school event. And
the dean enlisted then-Gov. Bill Graves and former state Senate President Dick
Bond, both Republicans, to go as well.
During the weekend of hunting in north-central Kansas, Graves and Bond said in
separate interviews recently, they did not talk about the cases with Scalia, nor
did they view the trip as a way to win his favor.
Scalia later sided with Kansas in both cases.
In a written statement, Scalia said: "I do not think that spending time at
a law school in which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably
cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could spending time with the
governor of a state that had matters before the court."
Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times reported that Scalia had been a guest
of Vice President Dick Cheney on Air Force Two when they went duck hunting in
southern Louisiana. That trip came shortly after the high court had agreed to
hear Cheney's appeal seeking to keep secret his national energy policy task
force.
The details of the Louisiana hunting trip, coupled with the visit to Kansas,
provide a rare look at a Supreme Court justice who has socialized with
government officials at times when legal matters important to them were before
the high court.
Federal law says that "any justice or judge shall disqualify himself in any
proceeding in which his impartiality might be questioned." By tradition and
court policy, justices are free to determine for themselves what constitutes a
conflict.
Specialists in legal ethics differed on whether the Kansas trip presented a
conflict of interest for Scalia.
"When a case is on the docket before a judge, the coziness of meeting
privately with a lawyer is questionable," said Chicago lawyer Robert P.
Cummins, who headed an Illinois board on judicial ethics. "It would seem
the better part of judgment to avoid those situations."
Added Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at Hofstra University: "A
reasonable person might question this, and that's the problem." He said
Scalia "should have rescheduled the trip until after" the cases were
over.
Other experts noted, however, that no one who met Scalia in Kansas was a named
litigant in the two cases, in contrast to the trip with Cheney, who is the
appealing party in the upcoming energy task force case.
"I'm not troubled by this because of the law school setting," said
Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor. He said he saw no problems
with the hunting trip. "The dean was an advocate, not the litigant."
Scalia said that if Supreme Court justices were prohibited from taking such a
trip, then they "would be permanently barred from social contact with all
governors, since at any given point in time virtually all states have matters
pending before us."
Since the two sex-offender cases in 2001, the state of Kansas has not had any
matters argued before the high court.
Scalia said he accepted an invitation to the law school "sometime before
October 2000."
"I had worked for a couple of years on getting him to come here. And he
asked whether there was any good hunting," McAllister said. "He said
he had hunted turkey and deer, but not pheasant, so that was appealing."
In the spring of 2001, the high court voted to hear both Kansas cases, and they
were set for argument that fall. McAllister said he called to alert Scalia that
he would be arguing the two Kansas cases before the court at about the same time
as the justice's scheduled trip.
McAllister said Scalia responded that he would come as scheduled, and that he
would not accept a speaking fee and would pay for his own hunting.
On Oct. 30, 2001, two weeks before the trip, McAllister and state Atty. Gen.
Carla Stovall appeared before Scalia and the other Supreme Court justices in the
case of Kansas vs. Crane.
The case tested whether the state could continue to hold sex offenders after
they had completed their prison terms. The two Kansas attorneys argued that
inmates likely to be a danger should be kept in custody.
Scalia arrived in Kansas on Nov. 15, 2001. He addressed a class and spoke to law
students, and attended a reception with local judges and lawyers.
"We kept him busy," the dean said. "And the students really loved
it. It's also a good change from Washington for the justices."
The University of Kansas, a state school, paid for Scalia's flight, meals and
lodging, according to Scalia's financial disclosure statement.
The next day, the dean dropped the justice off at the airport in Lawrence, Kan.,
where he met the governor and the former state Senate leader.
Bond, a 14-year state senator who retired at the end of 2000 as president of the
Kansas Senate, said he spoke with McAllister before Scalia came to Kansas.
"He was bringing out Scalia and he said Scalia really wanted to go pheasant
hunting," Bond recalled.
"He said he [McAllister] couldn't go because he was going to have a case
before the court and it would be inappropriate. He said he had no problem with
bringing him in and having him speak to students, but that he could not go out
and socialize with him."
Bond spoke to Graves. The former governor, in a separate interview, said he was
honored to have the chance to go hunting with a Supreme Court justice.
Graves said he and Bond decided to take Scalia to the Ringneck Ranch near
Beloit, Kan., which was owned by Keith Houghton, a friend of the governor.
Graves said they flew from Lawrence on the governor's official plane, which he
described as a King air prop, and returned on the same plane
after hunting. Scalia reimbursed the state $121.87 for the round trip.
"The controlled shooting part of the trip was good," Graves said.
"They plant birds, and that gives you a better attempt to get some
birds."
Added Bond of Scalia, "We stayed the night and had a delightful time. He
was just charming to be around."
Bond said that because the trip was two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, Scalia had told them in advance that he did not think it wise to fly
from Washington with his own firearm. So, Bond said, "I loaned Scalia a
gun. I have plenty."
Graves and Bond said the two court cases never came up during the trip.
"There was no conversation along those lines," Graves said.
Added Bond, "The cases were never discussed or mentioned. Zero."
However, both officials said the legal matters were critically important to the
state, or they would not have expended the money and effort to take them to the
Supreme Court.
The two also said they did not see a conflict in socializing with the justice
while the legal matters were pending.
"It's kind of a stretch to tie that together," Graves said.
When the trip was winding down, Bond recalled, "Graves and I told him we
would like him to be our guest and pay his way, and he said no."
Houghton, the ranch owner, said Scalia wrote a personal check for "several
hundred dollars" to cover his hunting, meals and lodging at the camp.
"Once he realized that we were a commercial institution, he made a point
that he had to pay for this," Houghton said.
To commemorate the trip, Houghton said, they took several photographs of the
justice — including one that now hangs in a large frame at the camp.
After Scalia returned to Lawrence, McAllister said, the dean and others
associated with the law school took the justice to dinner.
Two weeks after hosting Scalia, the law school dean was back in Washington to
argue on behalf of Kansas in a case called McKune vs. Lile. That case tested
whether Kansas could force sex offenders to confess all their past sex crimes as
part of prison treatment.
Robert Lile, an inmate, argued that the state policy would force him to
incriminate himself. A federal district court and appeals court agreed, and
Kansas was asking the high court to overturn those rulings.
During the oral argument, Scalia questioned whether the inmate had a
constitutional basis for his complaint. "Your client had been deprived of
no liberty to which he was entitled, not a single liberty to which he was
entitled," he told Lile's lawyer, Matthew J. Wiltanger.
The Supreme Court sided with Kansas in both cases, with Scalia voting on
McAllister's side each time.
In January 2002, the high court said in a 7-2 ruling in Kansas vs. Crane that
state officials could hold sex criminals beyond their prison terms if they prove
the convicts had a "serious difficulty" in controlling their behavior.
Scalia dissented, but not because he opposed the Kansas law. The court, he said,
should have given the state even greater freedom to hold sex offenders. The
ruling "snatches back from the state of Kansas a victory so recently
awarded," he wrote, referring to a Supreme Court decision allowing the
state to hold certain inmates indefinitely.
In the second Kansas case, the court in a 5-4 ruling said state prison
authorities could compel inmates to confess to past crimes as part of a
treatment program, and they could take away privileges from those who refused.
The lawyers who lost the two Kansas cases said that while they were curious
about the law school visit and the hunting trip, they never expected to win
Scalia's vote in the first place.
"I trust that Justice Scalia would have stepped aside had his ability to
rule been compromised by his hunting trip in the state," Wiltanger said.
Back in Kansas, Bond and Graves said Scalia had earned their respect as a
marksman. At one point in the field, the hunters were surprised by a quail, and
Scalia shot the bird in midflight.
"He came back with a bag full of birds," McAllister said,
"cleaned and packed in ice, ready to take back on the plane to
Washington."
Justice Antonin Scalia finds little
to like in Supreme Court term
WASHINGTON (AP) - In the space of a few days, Supreme
Court Justice Antonin Scalia groused when his colleagues overturned a Texas
death sentence, needled them about a gay rights decision and sarcastically
suggested their church-state ruling could steal health benefits from nuns.
He found something bad in each of six divided rulings handed down this week,
unusually contentious even for a justice known for his volume of passionate
dissents.
Scalia seemed to revel in stirring controversy within the confines of the court,
even as he quietly weathered criticism from outside about the appearance of
conflicts of interest.
The conservative Reagan appointee has been under attack for taking a hunting
trip to Louisiana with Vice President Dick Cheney in January, after the court
agreed to consider a privacy case involving Cheney's energy task force. Another
hunting trip with a lawyer appearing before the court in 2001 was reported
Friday.
But his fiery manner hasn't been dimmed.
Scalia was on the losing side in five rulings this week, more than any other
justice. And he wasn't fully satisfied with a sixth decision, noting his
opposition to one paragraph and a footnote.
In one dissent in a case involving a lawsuit against a Greece-based airline,
Scalia used arch language to accuse his colleagues of inconsistency.
Then he reminded the justices of two earlier rulings he opposed: barring states
from executing the mentally retarded and from prosecuting gay sex. The sodomy
ruling last June energized the movement for gay marriages, just as Scalia had
warned it would.
"Justice Scalia's voice has always been clearest when he dissents,"
said Washington lawyer Thomas Goldstein. "You almost get the sense that he
prefers the freedom to cut loose."
The church-state decision, a loss for the Bush administration and other
conservatives, prompted another strongly worded dissent in which Scalia warned
that his colleagues were inviting state control of religion.
"What next? Will we deny priests and nuns their prescription-drug benefits
on the ground that taxpayers' freedom of conscience forbids medicating the
clergy at public expense?" asked Scalia, a Roman Catholic and father of a
priest.
When the court ruled 7-2 that Texas woefully failed to give death row inmate
Delma Banks a fair trial, Scalia agreed with Justice Clarence Thomas' assessment
that a jury had all the evidence it needed to sentence him to death.
Of a 6-3 ruling that blocked reverse age discrimination lawsuits from workers in
their 40s, Scalia wrote that the court's reasoning was "anything but
regular."
For all the volume of dissents, Scalia had nothing to say about the Sierra
Club's request that he step down from hearing the case that will determine
whether names and details of the vice president's energy task force must be
released to the environmental group.
Twenty of the country's 30 largest newspapers have called on Scalia to recuse
himself because of the vacation Scalia and Cheney took, the Sierra Club told the
court in a filing earlier this week that included a sampling of editorials.
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported details of a separate pheasant hunting
trip to Kansas that Scalia took when the court was considering public policy
appeals involving that state.
The Kansas governor accompanied Scalia, flying to a hunting camp in November
2001 aboard a state plane, a trip arranged by University of Kansas School of Law
Dean Stephen R. McAllister, who was the state's lawyer in the cases, the
newspaper reported.
In a response, Scalia said: "I do not think that spending time at a law
school in which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably cause
my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could spending time with the governor of a
state that had matters before the court."
Scalia, who is just a few weeks away from his 68th birthday, had said earlier
that his trip with Cheney was not improper and that he did not plan to stay out
of the case.
"He truly reflects the arrogance of power," said Herman Schwartz, a
liberal law professor at American University. "He doesn't give a
damn."
Fiercely intelligent and with a flair for language, Scalia is known for
sometimes cutting dissents.
"I don't think he's walking around thinking he's a defeated man," said
Jesse Choper, a law professor at University of California-Berkeley. "He
will live to fight again."