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When the trip was winding down, Bond recalled, "Graves and I told him we would like him to be our guest and pay his way, and he said no."
Houghton, the ranch owner, said Scalia wrote a personal check for "several hundred dollars" to cover his hunting, meals and lodging at the camp. "Once he realized that we were a commercial institution, he made a point that he had to pay for this," Houghton said.
To commemorate the trip, Houghton said, they took several photographs of the justice -- including one that now hangs in a large frame at the camp.
After Scalia returned to Lawrence, McAllister said, the dean and others associated with the law school took the justice to dinner.
Two weeks after hosting Scalia, the law school dean was back in Washington to argue on behalf of Kansas in a case called McKune vs. Lile. That case tested whether Kansas could force sex offenders to confess all their past sex crimes as part of prison treatment.
Robert Lile, an inmate, argued that the state policy would force him to incriminate himself. A federal district court and appeals court agreed, and Kansas was asking the high court to overturn those rulings.
During the oral argument, Scalia questioned whether the inmate had a constitutional basis for his complaint. "Your client had been deprived of no liberty to which he was entitled, not a single liberty to which he was entitled," he told Lile's lawyer, Matthew J. Wiltanger.
The Supreme Court sided with Kansas in both cases, with Scalia voting on McAllister's side each time.
In January 2002, the high court said in a 7-2 ruling in Kansas vs. Crane that state officials could hold sex criminals beyond their prison terms if they prove the convicts had a "serious difficulty" in controlling their behavior.
Scalia dissented, but not because he opposed the Kansas law. The court, he said, should have given the state even greater freedom to hold sex offenders. The ruling "snatches back from the state of Kansas a victory so recently awarded," he wrote, referring to a Supreme Court decision allowing the state to hold certain inmates indefinitely.
In the second Kansas case, the court in a 5-4 ruling said state prison authorities could compel inmates to confess to past crimes as part of a treatment program, and they could take away privileges from those who refused.
The lawyers who lost the two Kansas cases said that while they were curious about the law school visit and the hunting trip, they never expected to win Scalia's vote in the first place.
"I trust that Justice Scalia would have stepped aside had his ability to rule been compromised by his hunting trip in the state," Wiltanger said.
Back in Kansas, Bond and Graves said Scalia had earned their respect as a marksman. At one point in the field, the hunters were surprised by a quail, and Scalia shot the bird in midflight.
"He came back with a bag full of birds," McAllister said, "cleaned and packed in ice, ready to take back on the plane to Washington."
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