In his 1997 book, A Matter of Interpretation, he began a defense of textualism by diagnosing why too many judges and lawyers pay too little attention to the words of written laws: "The overwhelming majority of the courses taught in that first year, and surely the ones that have the most profound effect, teach the substance, and the methodology, of the common law.American lawyers cut their teeth upon the common law." Justice Scalia's criticism of modern legal education was well known, and well founded. The professors overruled you unanimously." He laughed - not because he was surprised, of course, but because he wasn't surprised at all. A few months later, when I saw him at another event, he recognized me and asked if I had brought my new knowledge of constitutional separation of powers back to my law professors. In a group comprised mainly of practicing lawyers, Justice Scalia took special care to interact with the scattered law students.
In 2003, I took a break between summer law-firm jobs to travel to Colorado, where I attended the Federalist Society's biennial course that Scalia taught with Professor John Baker. It takes several weeks for their professors to put them back on track."Īs it happens, I experienced his enthusiastic disruption firsthand.
"I give lectures and stir up the students. "I go to law schools just to make trouble," he once told an academic audience in Brazil. And, as with so many of his dissents, he reveled in the act. In a career marked by famous dissenting opinions, one of Justice Scalia's most famous dissents was his departure from modern conventional wisdom in legal education. As important as originalism and textualism are, Scalia was pressing a much more profound truth: namely, of the fundamental importance of religious faith and civic virtue in a republic, and the dangers of stripping that moral foundation away from the education of all citizens - especially lawyers. On some occasions, he reached these issues expressly and bluntly, and there is much to learn from those particular writings.īut elsewhere his criticism of modern legal education was subtler, and it went beyond matters of mere judicial methodology. In a lifetime of educating American lawyers - in judicial opinions, articles, and lectures - Scalia often spoke directly to the state of American legal education itself. Justice Scalia's opinions mesmerize law students." "nd, if my hours teaching administrative law are in any way typical, he had an unerring instinct for what would persuade them or, at the very least, make them think harder. "He used to say that students were one of his target audiences," Justice Elena Kagan recalled in her contribution to the Harvard Law Review's remembrance of her late colleague and friend. Justice Scalia was reiterating a point he had made on many occasions, before many audiences. "And they will read dissents that are breezy and have some thrust to them. "Who do you think I write my dissents for?" But Scalia pressed the reporter, in turn, to look beyond the Court for his true audience. In the course of a surprisingly candid 2013 interview, she had asked Scalia about the sharp tone of his judicial opinions, pressing him on the effect that his opinions might have on his colleagues. "Who do you think I write my dissents for?" Justice Antonin Scalia posed the question to a reporter from New York magazine.
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