Francis Avila Jr.: Scalia a towering figure in protecting America’s ideals

In its eulogy on Justice Antonin Scalia, The Bee notes that “his originalist thinking sometimes aligned him with the courts liberals such as in 1989 when he voted to protect flag burning as free speech.” This is a testament to the integrity of his judicial philosophy, which forbade him to use the constitution as a subterfuge for incarnating his private opinions into law.

Scalia’s jurisprudence was simple: the Constitution is a document that, within clear textual limits, leaves the people broadly free to enact our policy preferences into law. To that end, it must be interpreted in a way that honors the text as understood by those whose ratification made it the supreme law of the law. Judges must resist considering the “living Constitution” school, whose votaries treat it as a Rohrschach test of illimitable interpretive possibilities. As Justice Benjamin Curtis warned in his dissent to the Dred Scott decision that when fidelity to the Constitution is abandoned, and the “theoretical opinions” of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we no longer have a Constitution, but “are under the government of individual men.”

Justice Scalia’s life was a warning that those who succumb to this theory have lost the title deeds of self government.

This story was originally published February 22, 2016 at 4:52 PM with the headline "Francis Avila Jr.: Scalia a towering figure in protecting America’s ideals."