When Stephen Breyer, President Bill Clinton's second appointment to the Supreme Court, was sworn in as an associate justice at a White House ceremony in 1994, Justice Antonin Scalia came up to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and said with a bright, mischievous smile, “First Ruth, and now Steve? Cass, it’s ALMOST enough to make me vote Democrat.”

Antonin Scalia was witty, warm, funny, and full of life. He was not only one of the most important justices in the nation’s history; he was also among the greatest. With Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Jackson, he counts as one of the court’s three best writers. Who else would say, in a complex case involving the meaning of a statute, that Congress does not “hide elephants in mouseholes”?

But his greatness does not lie solely in his way with words. Nor does it have anything to do with conventional divisions between liberals and conservatives (or abortion, or same-sex marriage). Instead it lies in his abiding commitment to one ideal above any other: the rule of law.

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But most of all, I mourn his loss as a person. During my first year at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was then a well-known professor, he treated me with immense kindness -- sending me his rough drafts for comments, asking me to write for Regulation (the magazine he edited) and encouraging my primitive academic efforts even as he disagreed with them.

When he left Chicago to join the court of appeals in Washington, he asked me to come to his office. He said, with a paternal air and considerable shyness, that he knew I would be teaching some of his courses, and I was the one he’d like to have his files -- filled with illuminating nuggets about the law, which he had accumulated over a period of many years. To a kid law professor, that was an act of extraordinary generosity, carried out quietly and with grace.

He was a great man, and a deeply good one.

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