On Thursday at noon I will be speaking at the Heritage Foundation on Justice Scalia’s Legacy. Noel Francisco will be providing the keynote address. Stephanos Bibas will be talking about Justice Scalia’s criminal procedure legacy, Rick Garnett will be talking about his religious liberty legacy, and I will talk about his separation-of-powers jurisprudence, with a special focus on the role of his dissents. It should be an excellent event, hosted by Elizabeth Slattery. It will be live-streamed, so please watch it even if you are not in the area.
Here is Heritage’s description:
On February 13, 2016, Americans lost a legal titan with the passing with Justice Antonin Scalia. Conservatives mourn the loss of a standard-bearer and liberals remember a worthy opponent. When he arrived at the Supreme Court in 1986, legislative history was considered more instructive than the text of a statute for determining its meaning and a majority of the justices thought they should weigh policy options as though they were legislators, rather than simply determining what the law required. But Justice Scalia thought otherwise. He believed that the Constitution and laws should be interpreted based on their original public meaning and based on their actual text; and this could be discerned through dictionaries from the period when the law was passed, from looking to the common law tradition, and foundational documents like Blackstone’s Commentaries to understand what things meant at the time the Framers of our Constitution drafted the language. In nearly 30 years on the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia brought about a huge shift in the law, leading to a generation of law students, lawyers, and judges who interpret the Constitution as it was written; and not how they wish it was written. Scalia’s legacy will continue to flourish. Join us at Heritage to hear from Noel Francisco, who clerked for Justice Scalia in the 1997 term, and a panel of distinguished law professors who will discuss Justice Scalia’s impact on the separation of powers, the integrity of the criminal justice process, and religious freedom.