James Rosen

So Roberts distinguished even breaking out the Black's Law Dictionary, which was another favorite trick of Scalia's.

I shouldn't say it's a trick, but a means of statutory construction, a tool of statutory construction.

That's how closely we were looking at text and language.

Roberts busted out Black's Law Dictionary to distinguish between a regulation

which is what the 77 law talked about, and a tax, very different, which a tariff, of course, is a tax on imported goods.

So in that textualist mold, one can see right there Justice Scalia's imprimatur.

And the fact that the ruling went against a conservative president would also have been something that would have been Scalia in the sense that if you're really practicing originalism and textualism, sometimes the results will come up in a way that displeased the honest judge.

But that's how you know you have an honest judge.

In a word, through the force of personality of Antonin Scalia.

When Scalia became a federal judge in 1982, President Reagan appointed him to the D.C.

Circuit Court of Appeals, one rung below the Supreme Court, where his colleagues at that time included Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Robert Bork and Kenneth Starr, a real murderer's row of judicial talent.

They prevailed in the law in the early 80s.

in American law, a liberal notion called the Living Constitution.

This is the idea that judges today should be able to expand the meaning of the Constitution or any law enacted since then to account for phenomena that the founding fathers could never have anticipated, such as the internet or nuclear weapons.

Scalia stood athwart all that.

The Constitution is neither living nor dead, he would say.

It is an enduring legal text.

Words have meaning and they don't change over time.

And if some judge is expanding the meaning of those words 10 minutes or 10 years or 100 years later, that's an activist judge enlarging his own power and violating the separation of powers.

Rather, Scalia said, we should always judges when they're doing their central business, which is interpreting the law and telling us what the law means.