Fox terror drama 24 is such damned good entertainment it apparently has persuaded not only US military personnel to ignore their commanders and the law regarding prisoner abuse but also has Supreme Court justice and apparent TV addict Antonin Scalia approaching the Constitution as if he were a character in the same exciting fictional world as Jack Bauer.

“Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles… He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Scalia told attendees at a legal conference in Canada this week, and then went on in the same vein, as if the last bits of the border separating TV-life and nonTV-life had evaporated utterly. “Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? Say that criminal law is against him. You have a jury trial. Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.”

Just one of the crazy things about this is the way our veteran Supreme Court justice threw in that say, as in “Say that criminal law is against him,” as if that were the only hypothetical part of the scenario he was presenting, when in fact all of it is hypothetical except the part about there being criminal law against torture.

In Scalia’s defense, though, you don’t get to be a Supreme Court justice by living fast. The guy graduated first in his class from Georgetown and then shined among the geekiest of the geeks at Harvard law school. He’s been a lawyer and professor of law ever since. He can’t really be expected to resist the tough-guy allure of the Fox Network’s sexy anti-terror squad. Justice Scalia wants to be like Jack Bauer! It’s his time! What’s more, how can the Harvard law school curriculum, years of dusty case review and arguments with his robed colleagues compare with Hollywood magic? Habeus Corpus? What does that even mean, man, when CTU has been infiltrated by evil doers and Los Angeles could be nuked?