On October 15, 1987, as Justice Antonin 
Scalia settled into his second term at the Supreme Court, he emerged from conference with his eight colleagues to discover a peculiar scene unfolding within the building’s typically staid corridors. Just outside of the conference room began a seemingly endless trail of white placards decorating the hallway carpet. On each placard, in handwritten lettering, appeared the name of a single prominent opinion that Justice William Brennan had written for the Court during his lengthy, high-profile tenure. Brennan’s law clerks had assembled the parading placards to honor the liberal hero’s thirtieth 
anniversary on the Court. As Brennan approached each sign, a law clerk later recalled, he would gleefully exclaim yet another landmark opinion’s name and then pause for a moment to recall his handiwork. Brennan was unaware that the Court’s newest member was following him only a few steps behind, grimly inspecting the assemblage of cases along the way. If Brennan was enjoying a stroll down Memory Lane, Scalia was enduring a slog up Trauma Avenue. For Scalia, Brennan’s extended run of liberal victories came at the cost of distorting the judiciary’s proper role in a democracy. When the trail of placards finally ended at Brennan’s chambers, Scalia managed to find a good-natured way of expressing his deep disagreement: “My Lord, Bill, have you got a lot 
to answer for!”

Today, some twenty-eight years into Scalia’s justiceship, legal liberals increasingly understand that he has a considerable amount to answer for in his own right. But Scalia’s legacy, unlike Brennan’s, would not be especially apparent from aggregating the landmark opinions that he has written on the Court’s behalf. This discrepancy does not mean that Scalia’s résumé is altogether lacking in this regard. During the last decade alone, Scalia has issued major opinions redefining the Second Amendment’s protection for firearms possession in District of Columbia v. Heller and the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause in Crawford v. Washington. Even accounting for Scalia’s many memorable opinions written in dissent would inadequately trace his legal imprint.

Instead of his influence being confined to a discrete set of writings or narrow doctrinal categories, Scalia has shaped modern American law in ways more overarching and even elemental. Elena Kagan, when she was dean of Harvard Law School, expressed this point vividly while presiding over Scalia’s return to his alma mater in 2007. “His views on textualism and originalism, his views on the role of judges in our society, on the 
practice of judging, have really transformed the terms of legal debate in this country,” Kagan said. “[Scalia] is the justice who has had the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about the law.” This statement can be understood to identify Scalia’s influence as occurring within at least three distinct arenas, each requiring some elaboration.

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