Almost everyone either loved Antonin Scalia or hated him. I’m ambivalent. He was a brilliant jurist and a joy to read. He was wrong about
same-sex marriage, but Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the somewhat daffy opinion
recognizing it, deserved
the ridicule Scalia piled onto him.
On crucial occasions, however, Scalia’s dedication to judicial
restraint, the main theme of his jurisprudence, evaporated. Then he turned into a partisan hack, with no
awareness that this had happened. It is
precisely because he was a great man that he was sometimes a tragic figure.
I elaborate in a column at Salon.com, here.