Lyle Denniston takes a crack at figuring out how history might remember Scalia. He sees a mixed bag.
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History will be kind to Justice Antonin Scalia — if the future fully appreciates his scholarship, his inventiveness in legal thinking, and his beguiling cleverness with words. It will not remember him well for his air of superiority, the sting of his rhetoric, his frequent disdain for collegiality, his exaggerated estimate of himself as a comedian and thespian.
Within the Court and among the panoply of past Justices, Scalia was as much the originator of a school of legal philosophy as Louis Brandeis, as gifted a legal craftsman as Robert L. Jackson, as influential an intellectual as John Marshall Harlan (the second), as path-breaking as Earl Warren.
But he also would become the most polarizing figure on the Court since George Sutherland, as impervious to changing times as Samuel Miller, as condescending as Felix Frankfurter, as self-absorbed as William O. Douglas, as controversial as Roger Taney.
In short, history will find him a deeply puzzling, but profoundly interesting, paradox. He was, as journalist and author Joan Biskupic anointed him, an “American Original.”
If there is a truly enduring part of his legacy, it surely will be his role as the patron saint of modern legal conservatism, and especially the branch of it that believes that the Constitution was essentially embalmed in 1789 (or when an amendment was added), preserved for adulation and imitation but almost always a bit musty and antique.
