Justice Antonin Scalia died ten years ago today, and he left an extraordinary legacy to the American people. Justice Scalia single-handedly revived legal formalism and textualism, which had been dead in the legal world since the Legal Realist Revolution of the 1920's.
Justice Scalia's revival of textualism and rejection of legislative history and original intent remains dominant today on the Supreme Court and in the lower federal courts, and it is increasingly important in legal academic writing. Justice Scalia taught all of us that words matter and that it is the original public meaning of a text which is the law, and not the intentions of those who wrote it.
In championing formalism and textualism, Scalia built on Attorney General Ed Meese's emphasis on originalist history, and Judge Robert H. Bork's insistence on the rule of law as a constraint on judges. Each of these three great men revolutionized American constitutional law and the law of statutory interpretation in their own distinctive way.
