Justice Antonin Scalia spoke Wednesday at a conference organized by the Institute of American and Talmudic Law, about American and Jewish Legal traditions of privacy.
Scalia argued, that under a proper conception of the judicial role, judges have little to say about privacy. He regarded the European Court of Human Rights, an organization which has developed an extensive jurisprudence on the right to respect in private life.
Pointing to a 2000 ruling by the Strasbourg-based European court, Scalia noted that Britain had violated the Convention’s guarantee of privacy when it prosecuted five men for gross indecency based on private group sex. A justice in that case referred to the lawyers’ conduct as a “five-man homosexual orgy.”
Scalia replied to that, “The court didn’t say how many people you need [for it to become public]. Presumably, it’s somewhere between five and the number it takes to fill the Coliseum.”