SCALIA, BREYER, AND INTERNATIONALIZING CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION: I mentioned a Power Line post on this yesterday. Now Prof. Kenneth Anderson has much more on the subject, and says that Breyer was misquoted by the press:

I was one of the organizers of the Scalia-Breyer debate – I’m a law prof at AU law school – and although the AP quote was, so far as I could tell, accurate, it was taken sharply out of context. Justice Breyer was speaking in a very specific exchange with Justice Scalia about the narrowly judicial act of interpreting legal texts, and it is quite unfair to take that remark about who participates directly in the process of interpreting legal texts that have already been informed by constitutional and legislative and other democratic institutions – judges, lawyers, law students (and it was obvious to the live audience that he included students as a courtesy to the audience of law students) – as being somehow antidemocratic. He was just noting the fact that legal materials, once they have been created through various democratic mechanisms, then become subject to interpretation by the interactions of lawyers and judges. It was nothing more insidious than that.

There’s much more to his post, and I highly recommend it. He also has a post with comments by Prof. Jamin Raskin — though I think that Raskin makes far too much of the Declaration of Independence’s language about “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” In the context of the Declaration, that merely meant that we would explain ourselves clearly, even as we undertook an enterprise that the leaders nearly all “civilized” nations found horrifying.

Ann Althouse, meanwhile, TiVo-blogged the debate, (a specialty of hers) and also rounds up some press reports.