Lawfare’s Adam Klein writes an appreciation of his former boss, Justice Scalia:
The first is a firm adherence to his bedrock jurisprudential principles regardless of his policy preferences. For the Justice, the only variable to be discovered in the process of judicial decision was the governing rule of law in each case—not the equities between the parties; not the policy stakes. For him, judging was simply a matter of solving for that variable using the interpretive tools sanctioned by textualism and originalism. As law clerks, our bench memos to the Justice were limited to two pages. No lengthy summaries of the facts; no long discussions of the policy merits of each side’s proposed rule. The only question that mattered was “what is the legal rule that resolves this case?”
A rough but fair measure of any judge’s commitment to principle is how frequently the judge’s legal reasoning leads to a real-world result that diverges from his or her presumed preferences. No judge is perfectly consistent, of course. (Some readers may wish to pause here to gesticulate angrily while shouting “Bush v. Gore! What about Bush v. Gore!” Take a moment and get it out before we move on.) But Justice Scalia accepted what he presumably considered “bad” real-world results with striking frequency—more than any other Justice, I would venture, and often to the exasperation of his conservative allies.
Good article – i can tell, because now I wish I had known the guy. In some ways, he reminds me of a programmer, although I’m at a loss to express how.
