Justices as 'Sacred Symbols': Antonin Scalia and the Cultural Life of the Law
| Author | Brian Christopher Jones |
| Position | Lecturer in Public Law, Department of Law, Liverpool Hope University/Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Polical Science, Amherst College |
| Pages | 7-23 |
Justices as “sacred symbols”:
antonin scalia and the cultural life of the law
Brian Christopher Jones* & Austin Sarat**
Liverpool Hope University; Amherst College, Amherst, MA
ABSTRACT
Perhaps no single judge in recent years has embodied the intricacies and difculties
of the cultural life of the law as much as American Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia. While common law judges have traditionally acquired status—and cultural
relevance—from the signicance, eloquence and forcefulness of their judicial opinions,
Justice Scalia took an altogether different route. Both on and off the bench, he pushed
the limits of legal and political legitimacy. He did this through a strict adherence to
what we call a “judicial mandate,” amboyant but engaging writing, biting humor
and widespread marketing of his originalist and textualist interpretative theories. This
article chronicles these features of Scalia’s jurisprudence and public life more generally,
ultimately characterising the late justice as a “sacred symbol” in American legal and
political circles, and beyond.
CONTENTS
Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies 6(1) (2017), DOI: 10.1515/bjals-2017-0002
© 2017 Brian Christopher Jones, Austin Sarat, published by De Gruyter Open.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
* Lecturer in Public Law, Department of Law, Liverpool Hope University.
** Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and
Polical Science, Amherst College.
The authors wish to thank the members of Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica
(Taipei, Taiwan) for their comments during a symposium on this topic.
i. scalia’s death ................................................................................................ 9
A. A Crisis of Scalian Proportions .............................................................10
B. The Progression of This Article ............................................................ 11
ii. the changing (Public) role of the Judiciary............................................12
iii. scalia’s rise to “sacred symbol” ............................................................14
A. Judging for the Right: Fullling (or Not Fullling) Judicial “Mandates” 14
B. Scalia’s Intangibles: A Personality on the Court ................................... 16
1. His Writing ...................................................................................... 16
2. His Humor ....................................................................................... 17
C. Leading Interpretative Theorist and Marketer ......................................18
6 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2017)
1. Scalia, Judging and Pop Culture ...................................................... 20
iV. Justice scalia as “sacred symbol”........................................................... 22
V. conclusion .................................................................................................. 23
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