Introduction
| Author | Jess Bravin |
| Position | Supreme Court correspondent for the Wall Street Journal |
| Pages | 1-5 |
IntroductIon
Jess Bravin*
Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies 6(1) (2017), DOI: 10.1515/bjals-2017-0001
© 2017 Jess Bravin, published by De Gruyter Open.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court of the United States will be lled by the time
you read this, but his shoes can never be. Short and stout, the late jurist nonetheless towered
over the institution he served, his sharp and sarcastic voice dominating oral argument in the
ornate marble courtroom, his pen—or, in later years, his iPad—producing piercing opinions that
provoked a disproportionate share of acclaim and outrage.
That the Court had never seen a wit like Scalia’s, or such a highbrow intellect suffused with
the common touch, is beyond dispute. Other aspects of Scalia’s legacy, however, will be the stuff
of debate for years. The range of essays in this volume offers some opening salvos in what may
be a long war over how—and how much—Scalia shaped jurisprudence in America and beyond.
Scalia intended his opinions, in particular his dissents, to be memorable, and they are widely
quoted in legal casebooks. But Scalia was more than a jurist or scholar, he was a symbol—on
the broadest level, to the general public, of judicial conservatism; within the conservative legal
movement, of a strictly-constructed counterrevolution to undermine the broad constitutional
visions of equality and liberty laid out during the Warren era of the 1950s and ‘60s. Brian
Christopher Jones, of Liverpool Hope University, and Austin Sarat, of Amherst College, set the
stage by highlighting Scalia’s symbolic, not to say supercial, signicance, something powerful
enough to inspire at least a marginal number of right-leaning voters to pull the lever for Donald
Trump in November 2016 after his pledge to ll Scalia’s seat with a nominee in Scalia’s “mold.”1
As a legal intellectual, Scalia is best known not for a particular doctrine but rather for
a method, originalism, which, broadly stated, aims to interpret laws according to the original
meaning their text conveyed at the time it was adopted. Not for nothing did Joan Biskupic title
her Scalia biography American Original, a play on words immediately recognizable to any law
professor.2
Scalia was originalism’s evangelist, traveling the nation to deliver a stump speech touting
it not simply as the best interpretive method, but as the only one of any consistency. While
originalism might have aws, he would say, “you can’t beat something with nothing.”
Others saw originalism differently, perhaps most nefariously as a stratagem to undo the
jurisprudence of the New Deal and postwar eras under the guise of fealty to the framers. “It is a
view that feigns self-effacing deference to the specic judgments of those who forged our original
social compact,” the late Justice William Brennan said in a 1985 critique. “But in truth it is little
more than arrogance cloaked as humility.”3
* Supreme Court correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
1 Brian Christopher Jones & Austin Sarat, Justices as “Sacred Symbols”: Antonin Scalia and
the Cultural Life of the Law, 6 Br. J. Am. Leg. StudIeS 1-17 (2017).
2 JoAn BISkupIc, AmerIcAn orIgInAL: the LIfe And conStItutIon of Supreme court JuStIce
AntonIn ScALIA (2009).
3 Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Speech given at the Text and Teaching Symposium,
Georgetown University Oct. 12, 1985, Washington, D.C., available at http://www.pbs.org/
wnet/supremecourt/democracy/sources_document7.html (last visited Apr. 12, 2017).
To continue reading
Request your trial