“Scalia’s Legacy: The Abiding Contradictions”

Jost on Justice:

 Antonin Scalia knew how to dish it out, but he wasn’t so good at taking it. Thus, Supreme Court watchers can be sure that the late justice would have nothing good to say about the myth-puncturing critique of Scalia’s career that law professor Richard Hasen dishes out in his new book The Justice of Contradictions.
From his earliest days after joining the Court in 1986, Scalia proclaimed himself to be the apostle of judicial restraint by virtue of his two signature jurisprudential theories: textualism and originalism. In Scalia’s telling, a scrupulously scientific focus on statutory text and original constitutional meaning leaves judges, even Supreme Court justices, nothing to do but apply established canons of construction to provide the correct answer to even the most baffling of legal issues.
Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California-Irvine, rightly notes the “hubris” in Scalia’s espousal of textualism and originalism. With a quarter-century of teaching law to his credit, Hasen proceeds to deflate Scalia’s puffery by proving with clear and convincing evidence that Scalia was simply wrong in claiming for himself to have been consistent in applying his touted techniques.

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