Scalia on Golf

Say what you will about Scalia, but having to read monstrous amounts of court opinions, I must admit that Scalia is by far the most entertaining. Yes, the below opinion was written by Justice Scalia in the Supreme Court of the United States. Just when you thought law wasn’t fun. Enjoy.

“It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States [under the US Constitution]… to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a ‘fundamental’ aspect of golf.

Kyle on Golf (that was a chip-in, if you're wondering)

Either out of humility or out of self-respect (one or the other) the Court should decline to answer this incredibly difficult and incredibly silly question. To say that something is ‘essential’ is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement (that is what distinguishes games from productive activity), it is quite impossible to say that any of a game’s arbitrary rules is ‘essential.’ Eighteen-hole golf courses, 10-foot-high basketball hoops, 90-foot baselines, 100-yard football fields — all are arbitrary and none is essential. The only support for any of them is tradition and (in more modern times) insistence by what has come to be regarded as the ruling body of the sport — both of which factors support the PGA TOUR’s position in the present case. (Many, indeed, consider walking to be the central feature of the game of golf — hence Mark Twain’s classic criticism of the sport: ‘a good walk spoiled.’) I suppose there is some point at which the rules of a well-known game are changed to such a degree that no reasonable person would call it the same game. If the PGA TOUR competitors were required to dribble a large, inflated ball and put it through a round hoop, the game could no longer reasonably be called golf. But this criterion — destroying recognizability as the same generic game — is surely not the test of ‘essentialness’ or ‘fundamentalness’ that the Court applies, since it apparently thinks that merely changing the diameter of the cup might ‘fundamentally alter’ the game of golf, ante, at 20.

Having concluded that dispensing with the walking rule would not violate federal-Platonic ‘golf’ (and, implicitly, that it is federal-Platonic golf, and no other, that the PGA TOUR can insist upon) the Court moves on to the second part of its test: the competitive effects of waiving this nonessential rule. In this part of its analysis, the Court first finds that the effects of the change are ‘mitigated’ by the fact that in the game of golf weather, a ‘lucky bounce,’ and ‘pure chance’ provide different conditions for each competitor and individual ability may not ‘be the sole determinant of the outcome.’ Ante, at 25. I guess that is why those who follow professional golfing consider Jack Nicklaus the luckiest golfer of all time, only to be challenged of late by the phenomenal luck of Tiger Woods. The Court’s empiricism is unpersuasive. ‘Pure chance’ is randomly distributed among the players, but allowing respondent to use a cart gives him a ‘lucky’ break every time he plays. Pure chance also only matters at the margin — a stroke here or there; the cart substantially improves this respondent’s competitive prospects beyond a couple of strokes. But even granting that there are significant nonhuman variables affecting competition, that fact does not justify adding another variable that always favors one player.” PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin, 532 U.S. 661 (2001).

Unfortunately this opinion was the dissenting one. The majority found Martin to have a right, under the ADA, to use a golf cart in the PGA. However, while the Court interpreted the ADA to allow the use of golf carts in consideration of existing injuries/disabilities, they did not take into account the possibility that golf carts themselves can cause injury. For any readers who may be wondering what kind of damages a golf cart can cause, see below.

Grievous Bodily Harm

Thank you Scalia for trying to protect time-honored golfing traditions. Maybe one day, if you have the time, we can swing the stick – I’ll even pay for the round + cart fee… that is, unless you’d rather walk.

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Tags: Humor, Legal Issues

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 12:07 am and is filed under Humor, Legal Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.