Justice found dead in Texas
Antonin Scalia will be remembered for impacting a generation of conservatives
This weekend one of my heroes passed away. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead Feb. 13 at age 79. According to CNN, Scalia was on a hunting trip in Texas with a number of family friends.
He was the longest serving member of the current court, having been nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.
Court — Justice Antonin Scalia passed away while on a hunting trip in Texas. Google Images
The first memory I have of Scalia was his now-famous interview with 60 Minutes. His larger-than-life personality, wit and great sense of humor shined through in the interview, and I was immediately drawn to him. My senior year of high school, my father and I were able to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court and see Scalia in person. He constantly interrupted the lawyer’s arguments and had the whole court room laughing more than once.
Yet what I will always remember him most for was his intense and unshaking commitment to his beliefs. Scalia entered the Supreme Court only a decade after the infamous Roe v. Wade decision. The predominant view at the time was that the Constitution was a living and active document — namely that the Constitution’s meaning adapts to the current society’s values.
The minute Scalia sat behind the bench in the Supreme Court, he became the public face and leading implementer of a revolutionary constitutional interpretation method known as originalism. This view stands in direct opposition to the living constitution view and believes the Constitution should be viewed as the writers and the society at the time it was written viewed it.
Scalia, along with Court of Appeals Justice Robert Bork and former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, led the charge for establishing originalism as the standard constitutional interpretation of conservatives. While Bork may have been the creator and Meese may have been the architect, Scalia was the megaphone for this new movement.
His opinions, most notably in dissent, were the intellectual foundation for the movement and became infamous for their accessibility, humor and oftentimes bite. One of his most read dissents came last year in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.
“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag,” Scalia wrote. “The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”
Scalia’s originalism emphasized the importance of self-government and downplayed the role of the Supreme Court. Through his decisions, Scalia sought to pull back the Court’s reach into the legislative branch and tried to empower the American people to make the changes they saw fit.
Yet Scalia’s philosophy did not purely lead him to decisions that he always agreed with. One very famous decision made by the court was in United States v. Eichman, where the court ruled that a person has the constitutional right to burn the American flag. Scalia voted with the majority in this case, supporting a decision that was not conservative politically and protecting something that he openly believed should be illegal.
“(Scalia) strained to be consistent, to rule based on principle rather than on his partisan biases — which made him stand out in an age when justices often seem as purely partisan as any other office holder,” Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times.
Scalia will be remembered as one of the most influential Supreme Court justices of all time. His writings have formed the foundation for an entire philosophical model of constitutional interpretation and will be read by law students for decades. His originalist philosophy has been so influential that it has begun to pop up in more liberal judicial circles. Most importantly, he inspired a generation of young people like myself to pursue a career in law.
Sutherland is the opinion editor.