According to the ABA Journal, Justice Antonin Scalia said this:
Justice Antonin Scalia predicted Monday that the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London will be overturned.
Speaking to students at the Chicago-Kent School of Law, Scalia criticized the decision allowing the city of New London to use eminent domain to seize property for economic development, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. “I do not think that the Kelo opinion is long for this world,” Scalia said.
Scalia ranked Kelo among the top cases in which the court made a mistake of political judgment, according to the Sun-Times account. The others were the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision in favor of a slave owner and the Roe v. Wade decision finding a constitutional right to abortion.
“My court has, by my lights, made many mistakes of law during its distinguished two centuries of existence,” Scalia said. “But it has made very few mistakes of political judgment, of estimating how far … it could stretch beyond the text of the Constitution without provoking overwhelming public criticism and resistance. Dred Scott was one mistake of that sort. Roe v. Wade was another. … And Kelo, I think, was a third.”
Well that’s nice, Your Honor. We hope this means you voted to grant cert in at least one the many cases that have been presented to the Court since Kelo. And since it only takes four justices to agree to grant a petition, we’re wondering why not one of them has been accepted. When reviewing petitions that seek to narrow, clarify, or limit a decision you say is as bad as Dred Scott, we’d hope that the cert pool clerk isn’t the one making the call. But since the Court has not accepted a single one of the many petitions presented to it in the six years since Kelo, what else can we think?