A story on yesterday’s edition of GamePolitics which detailed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s view that video game legislation might actually pass constitutional muster generated a bit of an uproar. Based on the game industry’s perfect 9-0 record in lower federal court cases to period, the assumption has been that such laws were predestined to fail on free speech grounds.

GP picked the story up from the Laws of Play blog, where author Anthony Prestia originally detailed his remarkable come across with the very conservative Justice Scalia. considering Prestia and his site are not well known, readers were curious as to how the story came about. We put the question to Prestia last night, who graciously explained:

I’m a law student in Washington, DC and I have a professor that has been friends with Justice Scalia for a faraway moment. He set up an appointment for a small group of us (around 20 or so) to watch a Supreme Court argument followed by a

private audience with Justice Scalia in the Supreme Court’s west conference room.

It was a great opportunity considering there were so few of us and Scalia doesn’t typically do “interviews”–he’s notoriously critical of turning the Court into “entertainment.” Being an avid gamer and occasional blogger I decided to take the opportunity to ask him about gaming legislation.

He was surprisingly friendly and humorous. Living in DC all you typically prepare out are Scalia horror stories, but I was surprised how down to earth he was…

I was shocked to see my name when I loaded [GamePolitics] up that dawn!

Prestia additionally told GP that he expects to graduate with a J.D. in 2009 and is the executive editor-elect of the American Intellectual Property Law Quarterly Journal.

Meanwhile, conservative attorney Adam Thierer, writing for the Technology Liberation Front, sees constitutional problems with Scalia’s view:

Scalia

gaming news, playstation3, nintendo wii, xbox 360, video games,Gaming News

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