“The late Justice Antonin Scalia will be remembered for his colorful comments from the bench, but court watchers say his true and lasting legacy will be the way he transformed the Supreme Court. Scalia, 79, died while on a hunting trip in Texas and will be buried on Saturday after a funeral in Washington. His sudden passing has set off a flurry of remembrances, with friends and foes alike hailing his intellect and rigorous approach.
“Justice Scalia changed the terms of the debate, if you will,” said M. Miller Baker, a partner at international law firm McDermott Will & Emery in Washington. “He made the Supreme Court a more rigorous place — more precisely, he required the court and litigants to focus on the actual meaning of the Constitution and the meaning of the statutes before the court.”
Baker, who worked on Scalia’s confirmation to the Supreme Court as a young lawyer in the Department of Justice during the Reagan administration, said the court as a whole is now more attuned to Scalia’s methodology. “There is at least an attempt to tie a decision to the actual text of a statute or the Constitution,” he said. “Before Scalia, the court was more prone to free-wheeling decision-making, and Scalia’s sheer presence alone resulted in the court being more disciplined as an institution in the way it decided cases and approached oral arguments.”
Even members of the court’s more liberal wing such as Justice Elena Kagan said Scalia changed the way she looked at the law.”
(H/T: The Hill via Instapundit, reformatted and emphasis mine)
