I was working in my office late on the afternoon of Feb. 13 when news began to spread that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died while on a hunting trip in a rather isolated part of southwestern Texas. Although the death of someone a month shy of his 80th birthday should not come as a shock, Scalia’s outsized personality and the impassioned nature of many of his written opinions, not to mention the frequency with which he would verbally wrestle with counsel at oral argument, had made it seem that he could and would survive indefinitely.
Without question, Scalia had a major impact on American law and the way that lawyers in the United States approach and think about questions involving the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and legislative enactments. By focusing on the precise language of a constitutional or statutory provision and what it was understood to mean at the time of its adoption, Scalia sought to confine judges to what he viewed as the proper judicial role, which was something far more limited than serving as an all-knowing super-legislature over which the public could exercise little to no control due to the life tenure enjoyed by federal judges.
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