After Two Unfortunate Misquotes, Justice Kennedy’s Office Takes Action
U.S. Supreme Court justices have been the victim of some unfortunate misquotes in recent news accounts of their speeches. Now the office of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is doing something about it.
Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t really say he would have dissented in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark desegregation ruling, according to the Huffington Post. What he really said in a recent Arizona speech: He would have dissented in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that Brown overruled.
And Kennedy didn’t really say, “I never read a brief I couldn’t go down the middle on,” the Supreme Court information office told ABAJournal.com in September. The ABA Journal website had repeated the incorrect quote from another publication. His actual quote to George Washington University law students was instead a comment on lengthy briefs. “I never read a brief I couldn’t put down in the middle,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy’s office took action to avoid any more misquotes when the justice spoke to high school students on Oct. 28 at the Dalton School, a private school in Manhattan. The office demanded the right to review any story for accuracy before it was published in the student newspaper, The Daltonian, and then made some changes, the New York Times reports.
Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathleen Arberg told the Times that Kennedy’s office made “a couple of minor tweaks” in the story. Quotations were “tidied up” to better reflect the justice’s meaning, she said.
Arberg said the request by Kennedy’s office was unusual. “Justice Kennedy does not have a general policy for making such requests,” she told the Times. “The request was most likely made by a member of his staff in an effort to be helpful.”
The story points out that some justices go even further and close their speeches to the public. But Frank LoMonte, the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, was critical of the request for prepublication review by Kennedy’s office. “It’s a request that shouldn’t have been made,” he told the newspaper. “That’s not the teaching of journalism. That’s an exercise in image control.”
