OPINION:
The death of Antonin Scalia shocked the nation and saddened all who knew him, and his life and what he did with that life will have political and legal consequences for decades. Nino, as his friends called him, was the longest serving current member of the court, and his influence on the law will be felt for as long as his fellow citizens enjoy the rights guaranteed in the Constitution he defended.
He took the Founders, and what they wrote in the founding documents, seriously indeed. He scorned the notion that the Constitution is “a living document,” propounded in certain law schools, arguing that 20th-century man knows better than the Founders what they actually meant themselves. In every case, often in a carefully reasoned dissent, he led his colleagues back to the Constitution that had served the nation so well for more than two centuries.
He understood that to abandon what the Founders intended was to abandon the document itself. His “originalism” slowed, though it could not halt, the work of liberal jurists to make the Constitution say what it never said, imposing interpretations flexible enough to justify and satisfy the whims and fashions of the season.
Justice Scalia was appointed to the High Court by Ronald Reagan in 1986, confirmed unanimously by the Senate, and served for nearly three decades. For once, a justice turned out to be the lawyer the president who appointed him wanted and expected him to be.
One of his most consequential opinions was written in 2010 in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Court upheld the originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment, guaranteeing the right of the individual person to “keep and bear arms.” Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion, with his usual and characteristic plain speech, like the plain speech in the Constitution. His death deprives the court of not only his voice but his grasp of history and his fearless intellect. His death leaves the Constitution at considerable risk.
He held his beliefs and convictions as precious and defended them with a fierce determination that they would ultimately prevail, but he held another view, not so often seen in the nation’s capital, that man should not try to live on bread — and the law, politics and obsession with current events — alone. There was pasta, and opera, and hunting, and telling and listening to a good story.
On the night before he died, surrounded by a diversity of friends and companions, he was his usual lively self at the dinner table. One of those companions recalls that “we talked a little about a lot of things, and none of them were the law or politics.” Nino was a man in full, a man of deep faith and devoted first of all to his wife Maureen and their nine children and his friends.
Just as a man is known by the friends he keeps, so is he known by the enemies who taunt, and in the wake of his death some of those enemies could not wait to get on the Internet to indulge ribald obscenities, celebrating at Nino’s expense. But the life of a good man remains with us, inspiring generations to come. RIP.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.