Brooklyn Bar Association hosts Justice Alito for a night inside a judge’s life

April 7, 2016 By Rob Abruzzese Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Brooklyn Bar Association President Arthur Aidala (standing left) moderated a conversation with judges (sitting from left): Hon. Andrew Napolitano, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and Hon. Mark Dwyer. Eagle photos by Rob Abruzzese

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The Brooklyn Bar Association (BBA) on Wednesday hosted three judges, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, for an intimate conversation between the judges and its members.

Before a crowd of nearly 100 BBA members, President Arthur Aidala moderated a conversation between Justice Alito; Hon. Andrew Napolitano, a retired New Jersey Superior Court judge and FOX News senior judicial analyst; and Hon. Mark Dwyer, a judge of the New York Court of Claims and an acting justice of the New York Supreme Court, Criminal Term.

“I watched Judge Napolitano doing this with Judge Antonin Scalia at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and I thought about doing that. But because I feel that this is such a special place, I wanted to give our members and our supporters the intimate experience in this small room,” Aidala said.

The three judges — all of whom graduated from Princeton University in 1972 — know each other well; Aidala also knows all three judges, so the conversation was very casual. Justice Alito even referenced the movie “Animal House” when talking about how hard the confirmation process was to become a Supreme Court justice.

The discussion included stories about the judges’ period at Princeton, as well as anecdotes about the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Eventually, the conversation turned to the controversial Citizens United decision.

“It was a tremendous shock and a great loss,” Alito said of Scalia’s death. “The court has not been the same without him and will never be the same without him. He was an original with a huge personality, who has had an enormous effect on the court in a lot of ways.

“He’s really changed statutory interpretation in the federal courts; that will last,” Alito said, going on to list some of Scalia’s contributions. “He completely changed oral argument in the Supreme Court. It was much more genteel before. Now it’s much more a clash of intellect. It’s a probing. It’s a very, very demanding constitutional law seminar.”

Alito acknowledged the Citizens United decision as perhaps the most controversial decision made during his career on the Supreme Court bench.

“There are many arguments in favor of the decision or against the decision, and the one that really irritates me is that the decision was wrong because it was corporate speech and corporations are not people, they’re creations of the law; corporations can’t think, corporations can’t speak and therefore corporate speech can’t be protected by the first amendment,” Alito said. “I wonder how many people take this seriously, because the vast majority of the political speech and the speech on public issues that occurs in this country is corporate speech.”

Napolitano tended to agree with Alito during the evening, but Dwyer often disagreed. At one point he jokingly goaded the other two judges.

When each judge was asked what he would tell the Founding Fathers if he could travel back in time, Dwyer drew a big laugh when he answered, “I’d tell them that when they get around to finalizing the Bill of Rights, make sure you put abortion in there, and, as far as amending the Constitution, make it easy enough to amend the 2nd Amendment.”

Alito shot back, “Mark would probably have a seizure if we ever actually agreed on something.”

When Alito was faced with the time travel question, he said, “What we’re doing is thinking about the problems that have developed in the 200-plus years of interpreting the Constitution. I think Justice Scalia was right when he said it would be better if it were easier to amend the Constitution because I think that would eliminate the pressure that has been put on the Supreme Court to, effectively, amend the Constitution through the process of interpretation.”