If there was a true surprise during my year clerking for Scalia, it was how little reference he made to political outcomes. What he cared about was the law, and where the words on the page took him. More than any one opinion, this will be his lasting contribution to legal thought. Whatever our beliefs, he forced lawyers and scholars to engage on his terms — textual analysis and original meaning. He forced us all to acknowledge that words cannot mean anything we want them to mean; that we have to impose a degree of discipline on our thinking. A discipline I value to this day.
Justice Scalia treated me with enormous respect and always seemed to value my opinion — a heady experience for someone just a year out of law school. I never felt as though he looked at me differently than my conservative counterparts; his trust felt implicit, which is, perhaps, why I struggled so much between wanting to challenge him and wanting to please. He was also, hands down, the smartest person I’ve ever known.
Absolutely a must read it all
H/T PJ Media
The vacancy will be hard to fill. Scalia educated many judges and lawyers with his opinions, wonder why the piece of sh** spent less than 2 minutes at Scalia’s viewing.
@MOS 4581:
because he a ‘piece of sh**’.
To the Liberal Lawyer:
I appreciate you taking the time to write about your experiences. I would hope that anyone in a position of making judgments would listen to the experiences you had, and that you seem to have learned from, that the important thing is that the laws be interpreted as closely as is possible to what the intent of the Constitution is and was at the time it was written. I do not believe judges should try to decide what the founders ‘intended’. I think they should rely on what the founders said, did , and wrote.
If I said someone is a piece of ‘shi*’, no one has to try to decide what I meant or was trying to say. It is obvious. While I’ll admit there may be more difficult statements to understand, I think the historical context should be applied and new groundbreaking is not necessary.
I don’t want to ‘give examples’ that should clearly be understood. I think what I said is clear and not open to interpretation.
Thanks for your kind comments on a great man. We are fortunate to have people such as he and Justice Thomas to serve the American people.