OUCH: “This weekend, the New York Times Magazine delivered the Christmas present most of us were wishing for most ardently: the written opinions of its staff about prominent people who had died in 2016. In particular, Emily Bazelon wrote a piece entitled ‘Antonin Scalia Didn’t Trust Science.’ The article is correct that Justice Scalia died in 2016, and the photograph of him at the top is genuine so far as I can tell, but that’s about as much as can charitably be said about it.”

Plus:

The ideal counterexample, of course, would be fairly hard to come by. It would have to be a case that also involved the use of DNA, decided around the same time as Myriad Genetics, and would have to commit Scalia to an outcome that he might find politically unpalatable (lest he be accused of simply going along with scientific statements he did not really believe to achieve a convenient result). Ideally, it would be something that would conclusively indicate that Justice Scalia understood and accepted the basic science about DNA, which is what Bazelon charges Scalia with doubting, and was able to work with it. But Bazelon says that “no one [she] talked to could think of an example” like that.

But, actually, there is one. And it is far from obscure—it’s an opinion that Jeffrey Rosen, writing for the New Republic, called the Justice’s “smartest, wittiest ruling of all time,” and “one of the best Fourth Amendment dissents ever.” It’s Justice Scalia’s dissent in Maryland v. King, decided just ten days before Myriad Genetics.

Ouch.