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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

The tragedy of Antonin Scalia




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.