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His almost 30-year tenure at the high court was transformational; perhaps most striking was his advocacy for originalism (or, more correctly, textualism)—a mode of constitutional interpretation that focused on the interpretation of the law by looking scrupulously to the intent of the legislators who wrote the law. Under his leadership, the court went from an institution often divided on the best way of interpreting the Constitution to a court that often deferred completely to Scalia’s textualist preferences. So profound was his originalist influence on his colleagues that when the court decided United States v. Heller in 2008, even the liberal dissenters approached the D.C. gun laws through the lens of originalism, leading many commentators to observe that Scalia had won: “We are all originalists now.”
There is no doubt that Scalia was a hard-line conservative—a juggernaut in reversing the Warren court revolution—he led the court into culture war battles over race, abortion, religion, the death penalty, and gay rights. But Scalia was also an occasionally surprising hard-liner when it came to protecting the rights of criminal defendants who could not, for instance, challenge witnesses testifying against them or the privacy rights of those who objected to the use of thermal imaging in searches of their homes.
