What Liberals Learned From Antonin Scalia
Justice Scalia’s enormous influence was not on actual case outcomes, at least not directly. For someone who sat on the court for three decades, he wrote few significant majority opinions. What he did was change how we talk about the law.
.. Justice Scalia was among the first to argue that constitutional interpreters should not be interested in the intentions of the framers but in the original meaning of the words they used. Original meaning turned out to be a life vest for the theory, keeping it afloat among conservative legal scholars and even some liberal ones... For Justice Scalia and his fans, you viewed modern issues through an 18th-century quizzing glass or else you were an “activist.” There was no in between.His laser-sharp dissents garnered a lot of attention, but he didn’t just talk through his opinions. He talked to lawyers and to legions of law students, using his charisma and the simplicity of his message to recruit foot soldiers who could peddle his message through organizations like the Federalist Society.
Liberals, meanwhile, have struggled to rally around a coherent alternative language in which to talk about the Constitution.
.. Justice Scalia lost some panache in his later years. The elegies you will read over the coming days and weeks may not mention that, perhaps appropriately, but it was well known to close watchers of the court. His dissents were rarely witty, his jokes too many and not funny. More than occasionally, his questions at oral argument reflected inattention to the details of the record.