Justice Scalia's Originalism: A Legacy of Textual Interpretation

On the 40th anniversary of Justice Antonin Scalia’s swearing-in, I wanted to reflect on one major aspect of his legacy to the American people. As many SCOTUSblog readers are undoubtedly aware, Justice Scalia led the way to an astounding revival of textualism and originalism, which had been dead since the legal realist revolution of the 1920’s.But that’s widely known. In this article, I want to tell the story of how I personally saw Justice Scalia actually set out to revive originalism, and in particular a specific version of it, by giving what was at the time a risky lunch keynote address at Attorney General Ed Meese’s Conference on Economic Liberties on Saturday, June 14th, 1986. One day before then-Judge Scalia’s speech, Attorney General Ed Meese had invited him to meet with President Ronald Reagan for what was (obviously) a job interview for a Supreme Court appointment. To put it mildly, Judge Scalia’s speech had high stakes for his future career. Given this, most lawyers would say something mild, uncontroversial, and ingratiating toward the attorney general. But Judge Antonin Scalia was not a normal, cautious lawyer. Indeed, as a law professor, he liked to teach against the views of his class and tell them things that they did not ordinarily want to hear. Or to make a more historical reference, Justice Scalia was the type of person who would speak to King Henry VIII as if he were St. Thomas More. He was temperamentally unable to flatter or to say something that he did not