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Here’s exclusive: A book party with a couple dozen guests — including two-thirds of the Supreme Court — at Antonin Scalia’s home in McLean.

The legal elite (John Roberts, Stephen Breyer,Sam Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Sonia Sotomayor, along with superlawyer Bob Bennettand top federal judges from D.C.) came together last week to celebrate the publication of “Henry Friendly,” a biography by David Dorsen. The guests stood around Scalia’s dining room table — laden with Maureen Scalia’s buffet of homemade hors d’oeuvres and her husband’s Italian cookies — to hear about the “greatest judge of his era.” And no, it’s understandable if you’ve never heard of him. . . .

Dull, maybe, but such an influential legal mind that Scalia wanted to throw this party — and his colleagues wanted to be there. (Yes, the Supremes socialize with each other a lot more than you’d think.) Scalia and his wife personally greeted every guest. After speeches, the longest-serving sitting justice yelled “Eat! Eat!” and shooed everyone to the buffet.

I would have liked to attend this party.

more people are struggling financially; more people need legal services to cope with foreclosures, evictions and credit and employment problems that could push them into long-term poverty; and state and federal financing for legal services has plunged.

So New York has imposed a requirement that all applicants to the New York State Bar have to perform 50 hours of pro bono to be admitted. Some people aren’t happy:

But his latest measure may prove more controversial, some of his admirers said, because it wades into a fierce debate among lawyers over whether mandatory pro bono service is the right solution — and because it could hit the pocketbooks of young lawyers at a time when they are struggling to find jobs. Judge Lippman and the court administrative board have the power to do so because, unlike in many other states, the New York court system, and not the bar association, sets the requirements.

“Lawyers do not like to be told what to do,” said Esther Lardent, president of the Pro Bono Institute, a nonprofit group that works with law firms to improve their pro bono services. “I worry about poor people with lawyers who don’t want to be there.”

Mike Rappaport wrote those interesting post about the generational gap between modern-day conservatives, who hew towards originalism, and latter-day conservatives who reject it–such as Charles Fired, J. Harvie Wilkinson, and Justice Alito.

Recently, a number of legal thinkers who might be described as conservative nonoriginalists have criticized originalism — Charles Fried, Harvie Wilkinson, and perhaps Justice Sam Alito.  They appear to have differing philosophical viewpoints — a certain kind of deontology, pragmatism, and Burkianism — but all seem to reject originalism as the primary basis for constitutional law.  What is going on?

Originalism has grown mightily in recent years — greatly expanding among libertarians and even increasing among liberals.  But one has the impression that the great majority of conservatives are originalists.  Does this trinity suggest otherwise?

I don’t think so, but part of what may be occurring is a generational disagreement.  My sense is that a very large percentage of conservative constitutional law scholars who are relatively young are originalists.  But people who grew up in an earlier period, such as Fried and Wilkinson, might be unlikely to be originalists given how criticized and unpopular the theory was when they were developing ideas about constitutional law.  Justice Alito is more of an intermediate case — he is younger than the others and certainly spent some time at OLC in its originalist heyday, but he did attend Yale Law School when originalism was near universally condemned and Bickel, who appeared to influence him, was no originalist.

Now that originalism has gained greater prominence, it is no surprise to see these older conservative nonoriginalists attacking it.  But that does not mean they are moving against it.  They always were against it; they just didn’t feel the need to criticize back when it was less influential.

The post seems to be gone now. Not sure why. But I like it.

Update: It is not linked at the Originalism Blog.