Originalism has lost its greatest advocate. No one did more to promote in the public mind the idea that statutes and the Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of the original meaning of their texts. Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy puts it well:
It is no exaggeration to say that Justice Scalia was the most consequential jurist of the past 35 years. A persistent, pugnacious and persuasive advocate for textualist statutory interpretation and originalist constitutional interpretation, he had an outsize effect on his colleagues, the court and the course of the law. More than anyone else, Justice Scalia is responsible for the renaissance of these interpretive methodologies and the displacement of “living constitutionalism” and reliance upon legislative history.
Before Justice Scalia joined the court, justices had no reluctance to join an opinion suggesting that statutory text could illuminate congressional intent where the legislative history was inconclusive. The issuance of such an opinion today, by any justice, is inconceivable. During the Warren and Burger courts, constitutional opinions often gave little consideration to the original meaning of the relevant text. Today, however, justices often duel over original meaning (see, e.g., the competing opinions in D.C. v. Heller). This, too, is largely due to Justice Scalia.
On a personal note, he was a wonderful boss, mentor and friend, and likely the greatest influence on me in my professional life apart from my immediate family — even when I disagreed with him.
FURTHER THOUGHTS: Steve Calabresi writes: "Scalia has fundamentally and forever reshaped the way Americans will think about law."
And from John McGinnis: Antonin Scalia– A Giant of Jurisprudence:
Justice Scalia is one of the few jurists who vindicate Carlyle’s great man theory of history. Because he brought three large and different talents to the Court, he changed the course of its jurisprudence. He had the intellect to fashion theories of interpretation, the pen to make them widely known, and the ebullience to make it all seem fun.
More than any other individual, Justice Scalia was the person responsible for the turn to both originalism in constitutional law and textualism in statutory interpretation on the Court and in the legal world more generally. Indeed, it was Scalia who made a crucial move in modern originalist theory. While a variety of scholars had argued that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the intent of the Framers, original intent originalism had some disabling flaws, the most important of which it is impossible often to find a unitary intent in a multimember deliberative body. Scalia championed a theory of original meaning that made the Constitution depend not on the intent of the Framers but on the publicly available meaning of its provisions.
And from Jack Balkin (who disagreed with him on many things):
Justice Scalia did more than perhaps any judge of his generation to move the Supreme Court toward originalism in constitutional interpretation and textualism in statutory interpretation. There is no doubt that he had and will continue to have a lasting impact on many different areas of federal constitutional and statutory law. Surely he must rank among the most important and most influential Justices of the past half-century, and perhaps, depending on how the future unfolds, of all time.
Posted at 6:30 PM