Supreme Court Corrects Scalia’s ‘Cringeworthy’ Error in Pollution Case

Antonin Scalia's Blunder Is Unprecedented, Legal Experts Say

Justice Antonin Scalia's factual error in a dissenting opinion Tuesday has become the talk of the legal community as experts puzzle over the extraordinary nature of the Reagan-appointed justice's blunder, which the Supreme Court quietly corrected as of Wednesday morning.
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Dan Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkley, called it "an unusually major mistake, and all the more surprising because Scalia wrote the American Trucking opinion" that he mischaracterized in Tuesday's ruling.

Scalia was dissenting from a 6-2 decision upholding the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate cross-state coal pollution. To help back up his judgment, he cited a 9-0 opinion he wrote in 2001 called Whitman v. American Trucking Association. But the EPA's stance in that case was the exact opposite of what Scalia said it was in Tuesday's opinion.

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Supreme Court Corrects Scalia’s ‘Cringeworthy’ Error in Pollution Case Everybody makes mistakes — even Supreme Court justices. But a factual error in a Tuesday opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia was unusually glaring.

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“Either some law clerk made the mistake and Scalia failed to read his own dissent carefully enough, or he simply forgot the basics of the earlier case and his clerks failed to correct him. Either way, it’s a cringeworthy blunder,” wrote University of California-Berkeley law professor Daniel Farber.

The Supreme Court posted a corrected version of the dissent.

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Somerville said:

I think maybe, just maybe, Justice Scalia is another person who "creates his own reality", nevermind the facts



More from Politico -- Antonin Scalia gets his facts wrong in EPA dissent - Associated Press - POLITICO.com

but such an obvious blunder can't be allowed to remain as part of the legal document.

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