Law Students Who Don't Know The Constitution

Justice Scalia is speaking to the UCONN Law School today. Yesterday he taught the lonely libertarian's girlfriend's Constitutional Law class. Not to be outdone, Quinnipiac's Law School invited this guy. So UCONN got SCOTUS, and we got CNN. Great.

Expanding on why UCONN students don't deserve Scalia's visit is this opinionated column from this past weekend's Hartford Courant's New England Magazine. One of the students concerned with the Scalia visit had this suggestion:

"At the student lunch after the Scalia lecture," he wrote in an e-mail exchange among law school students, "could we have a Ben & Jerry's ice cream social to accompany the luncheon? We were thinking of a theme along the lines of `Exercise your constitutional freedoms while you still can - choose your flavor and toppings.'"

Of course, we don't have any Constitutional right to ice cream flavors or toppings. A federal ban on flavors or toppings would be just as valid under the Commerce Clause as are laws restricting drugs and other items found to be dangerous. Provided a health-based rational could be articulated, Congress would be within it's power to restrict this precious freedom of choice. Scalia would support such a law under the Constitution, even if he disagreed with it. And so to would everyone else on the Court, paticularly the members of the Court's liberal wing who have never shied away from upholding the authority of the federal government.

The point is, laws restricting ice cream are just as dumb as sodomy laws, but don't blame Scalia for upholding the Constitution.