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Introduction
 
Judge Jeffrey Sutton
 
Long before I became a federal judge, I had the good fortune of clerking for Justice Scalia. How life-changing—how much fun—to come across someone early in my legal career with such a rigorous intellect, spirit of curiosity, and fearless character. Once you had a drink at that well, there was no turning back. If anyone knew how to inspire a young person to turn law into a calling, it was Justice Scalia.
 
Most memorable was his passion for every case. During his thirty years on the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia wrote 870 opinions: 281 majority opinions, 315 concurrences, and 274 dissents. He seemed to enjoy every one of them, penning engaging opinions in land- mark and humdrum cases alike. No matter the stakes, he prized coherence—always—and his mind didn’t come to rest until each string of thought had come into tune. He showed that all cases, great and small, deserve the same rigor and care.
 
All of this seemed to come easily to him because competitions of the mind came naturally to him. If there is one aspect of Justice Scalia seared into my mind, it’s the value he placed on ideas. Few things made him happier than a vigorous debate over the right way to think about a problem. I thought of him as the chess master who comes to the park on a Saturday morning and is disappointed to see just ten other chess players willing to take him on. Even his first book, A Matter of Interpretation, excerpted in several places here, is written, revealingly, in a debate format. He presented a theory of judging, then asked several prominent professors to challenge him, signaling confidence, humility, and transparency all at once.
 
As much as Justice Scalia relished the give-and-take of debate, he did not let it interfere with relationships. Some of his closest friends on the Court were colleagues with whom he vigorously disagreed at times. It makes me smile to know that many Americans, and nearly all American judges, know that Justice Scalia attended one opera after another with Justice Ginsburg and taught Justice Kagan how to hunt. Who can say what showed more collegiality: enduring thirty-five years of long, difficult-to-follow operas, or teaching a potential adversary how to use a gun?
 
During one of my last visits with Justice Scalia, I saw striking evidence of the Scalia-Ginsburg relationship. As I got up to leave his chambers, he pointed to two dozen roses on his table and noted that he needed to take them down to “Ruth” for her birthday. “Wow,” I said, “I doubt I have given a total of twenty-four roses to my wife in almost thirty years of marriage.” “You ought to try it sometime,” he retorted. Unwilling to give him the last word, I pushed back: “So what good have all these roses done for you? Name one five-four case of any significance where you got Justice Ginsburg’s vote.” “Some things,” he answered, “are more important than votes.”
 
I let him have the last word.
 
A high point of my clerkship year was listening to him give a dramatic reading of one of his dissents to the “clerkerati,” as he affectionately called us. You might have thought he was delivering a soliloquy from Macbeth. A suffering acknowledgment here, a dramatic waving of the hand there, and a twinkle in his eye throughout left one wondering whether this writing concerned a legal dispute after all. Justice Scalia took joy in writing well.
 
The clerkship also came with humbling moments, some self-inflicted. I wrote a draft dissent for the justice that at one point drew a comparison with the Know-Nothing Party of the nineteenth century. Crestfallen when the justice removed the line from the draft opinion, I had the audacity to ask him why he had taken it out. “Well, Jeff,” he explained, “the first reason is that you spelled it ‘No-nothingism.’” I couldn’t bring myself to ask him for the second reason. Know nothing indeed.
 
For those who never had a chance to work with Justice Scalia, there’s another way to know him: read his opinions and articles and speeches. Each time he wrote, his audience was anyone with an interest in the American legal system, whether a first-year law student or an engaged citizen. As a former law professor, he knew how to weave a narrative with amusing asides and clever analogies to present his arguments in the most accessible terms. Once on the Court, he never stopped teaching; his classroom just got bigger.
 
What you read is what you get with Justice Scalia. He took great care with the written word and meant every word he wrote. All of his colors come through in his writings, as he was not the kind of judge to mask his true views about the right answer to a legal problem. That’s especially so with his dissents and concurrences, when he did not have to write for the Court or account for a colleague’s take on the case.
 
Witness this excerpt from one of his dissents, which arose in a criminal case and concerned a question that judges see all the time—whether eyewitnesses to a crime had accurately identified the defendant as the culprit. Justice Scalia objected to the majority’s position that new evidence could have changed the verdict, making the point in a memorable and convincing manner. The Court’s objection, he pointed out, was that the four eyewitnesses could identify the defendant as the assailant “not by his height and build, but only by his face.” But that ought to be enough, he insisted:
 
Facial features are the primary means by which human beings recognize one another. That is why police departments distribute “mug” shots of wanted felons, rather than Ivy-League-type posture pictures; it is why bank robbers wear stockings over their faces instead of floor-length capes over their shoulders; it is why the Lone Ranger wears a mask instead of a poncho; and it is why a criminal defense lawyer who seeks to destroy an identifying witness by asking “You admit that you saw only the killer’s face?” will be laughed out of the courtroom.1
 
Or take this opening from a technical case about administrative law from his early years as a judge: “This case, involving legal requirements for the content and labeling of meat products such as frankfurters, affords a rare opportunity to explore simultaneously both parts of Bismarck’s aphorism that ‘No man should see how laws or sausages are made.’”2
 
Justice Scalia’s opinions stand out for their lucidity and rigorous analysis—and off-the-beaten-path imagery that captured the problem at hand. Surely there was a separation-of-powers problem with the creation of “a sort of junior-varsity Congress,”3 or a flaw in a dormant Commerce Clause test that asked judges to divine “whether a particular line is longer than a particular rock is heavy.”4 By the same token, who could argue with his observation that Congress “does not . . . hide elephants in mouseholes”? 5 The justice could cut to the heart of a matter and signal that a colorful opinion was coming just by re-framing the question presented: “It ha[s] been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States . . . to decide What Is Golf.”6 Say what you will about Justice Scalia, his opinions never put anyone to sleep.
 
If Justice Scalia inspired his clerks and law students with writing that leaped off the page, he inspired advocates in other ways. Long before he unsheathed his pen, advocates confronted his tenacity in the courtroom, something I experienced firsthand during my dozen oral arguments at the Court. His deep convictions about the proper role of the federal courts, his capacity to identify the soft tissue in any argument, and his flinty-minded, sometimes sidesplitting wit commanded every lawyer’s attention. One wonders if any justice before or since has caused advocates to lose more sleep in the days and weeks before an oral argument as they tried to anticipate what he might ask and how they might answer it.
 
Every advocate had to come to grips with Justice Scalia’s track record on the issue at stake and his clear-eyed philosophy about the proper way to interpret laws. He tested every advocate with signature questions that went to the core of the case. If you were looking for a tepid or coy justice, he was not your man. The other side of it was that he let you know during the argument just where you stood while there was still time to do something about it, whether by correcting a mis-impression or tacking to a different point. Advocates came to appreciate his candor (most of the time). The North Star to Justice Scalia was getting the reasoning right—an admonition he never ceased to urge on others and never desisted to accept for himself.
 
You cannot be a lawyer today, a good lawyer anyway, without understanding Justice Scalia’s methods of interpretation. Originalism, his way of interpreting the Constitution, and textualism, his way of interpreting statutes, are now forever linked to him. Both methods turn on the same essential insights: language has meaning (that’s why we use words rather than musical notes or colors to make a law), and that meaning is fixed and does not evolve (that’s why we write the words down in the first place).