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Volume 50, Issue 113 | thursday, march 31, 2016 | ndsmcobserver.com
Lecture reflects on Justice Scalia’s legacy Law professor considers Scalia’s influence on the future of the Supreme Court and American law By LUCAS MASIN-MOYER News Writer
In the midst of the fight in Washington over the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the Young Americans for Freedom hosted the O’Toole Professor of Constitutional Law at Notre Dame, Anthony J. Bellia Jr., to discuss the legacy of Justice Scalia, a man who Bellia called the “the second most inf luential conservative of the twentieth century behind Ronald Reagan.” Bellia said there were major differences between the Federalists, who supported the implementation of a strong court, and the AntiFederalists who feared the power of an unelected body with such great sway.
“Justice Scalia, in a sense, was the modern day torchbearer of the argument that courts should have a self imposed limited role in the way that they decide cases,” Bellia said. “Justice Scalia’s primary legacy is that he was a proponent, of when it came to the constitution, giving effect to its original meaning, how is the constitution understood as a public matter at the time it was adopted, when it came to statutes, he was in favor of textualism,” Bellia said. Bellia said Scalia’s approach approach towards interpreting the constitution, followed a doctrine called “original public meaning.” Scalia believed, according to Bellia, that “what is relevant is not the intent of those who see SCALIA PAGE 3
Author explores democratic rule By JENNA WILSON News Writer
Abraham Lowenthal, professor emeritus of international relations at the University of Southern California, delivered a lecture on democratic transitions Wednesday afternoon. The lecture was sponsored by the Kellogg Institute of International Studies and focused on the book Lowenthal published with Sergio Bitar titled “Democratic Transitions: Conversations with World Leaders.” “We know full well that ours is not a book of rigorous comparative politics with quantifiable and comparable data … we focused must of our attention on political leaders at the apex of government parties or political movements,” he said. “[This book is a] different form of comparative politics but it produces something that may or may not be political science, but it certainly gives us access to political wisdom which may be harder to
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CHRIS COLLINS | The Observer
Anthony J. Bellia Jr., former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, explores the lingering implications of Scalia’s death on future Supreme Court rulings in a lecture Wednesday night.
Professor receives grant By KATHRYN MARSHALL News Writer
interference by active sensor system.” According to the Office of Naval Research website, “YIP seeks to identify and support academic scientists and engineers who are in their first or second full-time tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent academic appointment ... and who show exceptional promise for doing creative research.” Through her project, Kloepper will combine biology, physics
and engineering to determine how bats manage to avoid interference when leaving caves at over 1,000 bats per second. “They’re making these echolocation sounds in really dense groups, and they should be ‘jamming’ each other, but somehow they’re able to overcome this challenge and still be able to use their echolocation,” Kloepper said. “Everything we
achieve than political science.” Lowenthal said that he and Bitar interviewed 12 former presidents and one former prime minister while gathering information for the book. Lowenthal said he only studied cases of democratic transitions where countries had no reversals back toward authoritarian regimes after switching to democracy. “Democratic governments are not perfect and complete anywhere,” Lowenthal said. “However, as democratic transitions are occurring the proposition is that people who are involved in making that happen ought to be able to learn from cases where [democratization] has succeeded.” According to Lowenthal, he and Bitar more than over three hours interviewing these politicians in order to understand the contributions made toward the democratic progress. “We had a strategic objective
SMC announces new major
see LECTURE PAGE 3
see PHYSICS PAGE 5
VIEWPOINT PAGE 7
Laura Kloepper, an assistant professor of biology at Saint Mary’s, will be joined by two undergraduate students to study bat echolocation this summer thanks to a grant from the Office of Naval Research 2016 Young Investigator Program Award (YIP), for her project “Biologically inspired approaches to overcome mutual
By NICOLE CARATAS Saint Mary’s Editor
The Saint Mary’s department of chemistry and physics will offer majors in the field of physics in addition to the existing chemistry major. Ian Bentley, associate professor of chemistry and physics, said there was a fair amount of student interest in having physics as a major.
SCENE PAGE 9
“Everyone that I would talk to about it knew of a student that was interested,” he said. “You add those all up and see that it’s quite a few students who have been interested in physics, not just one.” According to Bentley, the department discussed the potential of creating a physics major, especially to support the students in the engineering dual degree program with Notre
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see GRANT PAGE 5
Dame. The program allows Saint Mary’s students to graduate with a degree from Saint Mary’s before transferring to Notre Dame for a fifth year to earn their engineering degree. Chris Dunlap, chair of chemistry and physics at the College, said when Bentley was hired in the fall of 2014, there was no physics major or minor.
MEN’s BASKETBALL PAGE 16