It’s still Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court

Justice Antonin Scalia, a great dissenter, once remarked, “My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, a great dissenter, once remarked, “My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk.” Today, many of Scalia’s former law clerks are conspicuously on the frontlines at the Supreme Court, where they have gone from junior partners-in-dissent to the masters of the right-wing legal agenda. In the 1990s, after experiencing a string of losses in disputes over societal dilemmas, Scalia wrote of the majority. “Day by day, case by case, it is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.” Today, liberals might adopt that mantra. Recent rulings in cases engineered by former clerks to Scalia and other conservative justices include abolishing a constitutional right to abortion, bolstering Second Amendment gun rights and ending campus affirmative action. Those groundbreaking decisions would have won the vote of Scalia, a right-wing icon who died in 2016. His writings, once regarded as extreme, have become conventional at the high court, in large part because of former law clerks who have pushed his agenda as advocates or as judges themselves. “The justices’ ideas are living on through their former clerks,” Georgetown University constitutional law professor Brad Snyder. “This is a way that Scalia – long after he stopped writing – is still having a profound influence on American law and politics.”