The following feedback to Ayrel Clark’s Oct. 8 “Justice Scalia, the original constitutional guy” was posted on the Daily Web site.

One wonders what some of the original framers of the Constitution would have said about Scalia’s alleged paranoid fear of anarchy in the face of change (which is actually, one suspects, an excuse to enact his own brand of conservative judicial activism)?

Thomas Jefferson was eerily prescient on this issue when he wrote (on reform of the Virginia constitution):

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment… laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind … as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, institutions must advance also, to keep pace with the times….We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Jonathan Williams

Graduate student

Electrical and computer engineering