Nino the Great

Scalia's dissent in the Kentucky 10 Commandments case:

What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle. That is what prevents judges from ruling now this way, now that thumbs up or thumbs down as their personal preferences dictate. Today's opinion forthrightly (or actually, somewhat less than forthrightly) admits that it does not rest upon consistently applied principle. In a revealing footnote, ante, at 11, n. 10, the Court acknowledges that the Establishment Clause doctrine it purports to be applying lacks the comfort of categorical absolutes. What the Court means by this lovely euphemism is that sometimes the Court chooses to decide cases on the principle that government cannot favor religion, and sometimes it does not. The footnote goes on to say that [i]n special instances we have found good reason to dispense with the principle, but [n]o such reasons present themselves here. Ibid. It does not identify all of those special instances, much less identify the good reason for their existence.