On September 26—a day that just happened to be the 27th anniversary of his swearing-in as associate justice—Antonin Scalia entered the Supreme Court’s enormous East Conference Room so casually that one might easily have missed him. He is smaller than his king-size persona suggests, and his manner more puckish than formal. Washingtonians may know Scalia as charming and disarming, but most outsiders tend to regard him as either a demigod on stilts or a menace to democracy, depending on which side of the aisle they sit. A singularity on the Court and an icon on the right, Scalia is perhaps more responsible than any American alive for the mainstreaming of conservative ideas about jurisprudence—in particular the principles of originalism (interpreting the Constitution as the framers intended it rather than as an evolving document) and textualism (that statutes must be interpreted based on their words alone). And he has got to be the only justice to ever use the phrase “argle-bargle” in a dissent...
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