Antonin Scalia Was Democracy’s Legal Champion He changed the way judges looked at text and law, and he was the best writer the Supreme Court has ever known.By Michael W. McConnell

Posted By on February 15th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/antonin-scalia-was-democracys-legal-champion-1455482790

Mr. McConnell, a law professor and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday at age 79, was the most influential Supreme Court justice of the past 30 years. Not because he had the votes. He was influential because he had a clear, consistent, persuasive idea of how to interpret the Constitution: It means what it says; it means what those who enacted it meant to enact.

And Justice Scalia was influential because he wrote opinions with verve and good sense, in prose that any American could read and understand. He was the best writer the Supreme Court has ever known—and with justices like John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Jackson, that is saying a lot. He was the court’s most withering logician. He showed us what a real judge can be, even on that most political court.

When Justice Scalia arrived at the Supreme Court in 1986, its jurisprudence had become sloppy, results-driven, plagued with fuzzy three-part tests and fuzzier four-part tests, all of them concocted by his predecessors with little basis in constitutional text. Today, the entire court—even the liberal justices—have adopted Justice Scalia’s style: close attention to text, awareness of history, analytical rigor. The Supreme Court has not announced an impressionistic multipart “test” in years. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE

 

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