So passionate, so principled, iconic, a legal titan, a "formidable thinker" whose legal writings stand as "a Roman candle of sparkling jurisprudential theories leavened by acerbic witticisms," (Will, Washington Post).
He had friends not sharing his masquerading quest for truth, and he was even more caustic than is known.
Wow.
Enough of this nonsense.
Scalia was a corrupt member on the Court whose service to the Republican Party and the ruling oligarchies was unwavering, and his antipathy to racial justice is repellent to any American with a fleeting grasp of history.
He played with the liberties of citizens, far more often than not finding the liberty interest of people was not prominent in the face of whatever state power inflicted onto black, brown, immigrants, Native Americans and gay Americans, in particular victims of the criminal justice system and white supremacists.
Principled?
As noted by Judge Richard Posner, a decent and honest public intellectual:
Judges tend to deny the creative—the legislative—dimension of judging, important as it is in our system, because they do not want to give the impression that they are competing with legislators, or engaged in anything but the politically unthreatening activity of objective, literal-minded interpretation, using arcane tools of legal analysis. The fact that loose constructionists sometimes publicly endorse textualism is evidence only that judges are, for strategic reasons, often not candid.
Outside of D.C. in reality land, "This doesn’t get said enough: Scalia is an intellectual fraud who uses a phony methodology to get whatever judicial outcomes align with his political preferences ... , (Campos, Salon).
Or as The Onion puts it: "Justice Scalia Dead Following 30-year Battle with Social Progress."
Good riddance.
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