Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/10pdf/09-530.pdf
Page Number: 30.0

2 

NASA v. NELSON 

SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment 

federal  and  state  statutes,  Rules  of  Evidence  from  four 
states,  two  Executive  Orders,  a  House  Report,  and  even 
more  exotic  sources  of  law,  such  as  two  reports  of  the
Government Accountability Office and an EEOC document 
concerning  “Enforcement  Guidance.”    And  yet  it  contains
not  a  single  citation  of  the  sole  document  we  are  called
upon  to  construe:  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States. 
The  body  of  the  brief  includes  a  single,  fleeting  reference
to  the  Due  Process  Clause,  buried  in  a  citation  of  the 
assuredly  inapposite  Lawrence  v.  Texas,  539  U. S.  558 
(2003), Brief for Respondents 42; but no further attempt is
made  to  argue  that  NASA’s  actions  deprived  respondents
of liberty without due process of law.  And this legal strat-
egy was not limited to respondents’ filing in this Court; in
the  Ninth  Circuit  respondents  asserted  in  a  footnote  that 
“courts  have  grounded  the  right  to  informational  privacy
in various provisions of the Constitution,” Brief for Appel-
lants in No. 07–56424, p. 25, n. 18, but declined to identify
which ones applied here.

To  tell  the  truth,  I  found  this  approach  refreshingly
honest.  One  who  asks  us  to  invent  a  constitutional  right 
out  of  whole  cloth  should  spare  himself  and  us  the  pre-
tense  of  tying  it  to  some  words  of  the  Constitution.  Re-
grettably,  this  Lincolnesque  honesty  evaporated  at  oral 
argument, when counsel asserted, apparently for the first
time  in  this  litigation,  that  the  right  to  informational 
privacy emerged from the Due Process Clause of the Fifth 
Amendment.  Tr.  of  Oral  Arg.  28–29.    That  counsel  in-
voked  the  infinitely  plastic  concept  of  “substantive”  due 
process  does  not  make  this  constitutional  theory  any  less
invented. 

This  case  is  easily  resolved  on  the  simple  ground  that 
the  Due  Process  Clause  does  not  “guarante[e]  certain
(unspecified)  liberties”;  rather,  it  “merely  guarantees
certain  procedures  as  a  prerequisite  to  deprivation  of 
liberty.”  Albright  v.  Oliver,  510  U.  S.  266,  275  (1994)