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View Full Version : Scalia: A Tribute



Kathianne
02-13-2016, 11:22 PM
This sums up how we presently view Scalia, by someone who clerked for him. As with any significant figure, history will say more.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/13/scalia-text-legacy-clerk-steven-calabresi-column/80349810/


<section id="module-position-OzkILS7nfI4" class="storytopbar-bucket story-headline-module story-story-headline-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 17.92px;">Scalia towered over John Marshall: Steven Calabresi

</section><section id="module-position-OzkILS96pJE" class="storytopbar-bucket story-byline-module story-story-byline-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 17.92px;">Steven G Calabresi10 p.m. EST February 13, 2016
</section>Supreme Court justice reshaped a misguided legal culture.









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Justice Scalia will be remembered for his commitment to the principle that judges should be guided in deciding cases by the original public meaning of the texts that they are interpreting. He has totally reshaped the legal culture so that today there is much less use of legislative history and much more reliance on the constitutional text than there was prior to his elevation to the Supreme Court in 1986 (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/02/13/timeline-supreme-court-associate-justice-antonin-scalia/80349734/). Even liberal justices like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan (http://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx) often joined Justice Scalia’s opinion or wrote textualist opinions that Justice Scalia could join. Scalia has fundamentally and forever reshaped the way Americans will think about law.

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Justice Scalia was often on the conservative side of the Supreme Court, but he had a strong rule-of-law libertarian streak that occasionally caused him to side with the Supreme Court’s liberals. He joined a five to four majority opinion that held that laws against flag burning were unconstitutional (http://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/02/13/scalia-burning-flag-piers-intv.cnn), and he recently ruled that the police cannot attach GPS tracking devices (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/justice-scalia-turns-to-18th-century-wisdom-for-guidance-on-gps/251883/) to people’s cars or bring drug-sniffing dogs to their front doors (http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/03/opinion-issued-in-florida-v-jardines/) without getting a warrant first. Justice Scalia did the right thing in these cases because he followed the law and not his political policy preferences.

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