Antonin Scalia Quotes
Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.
Antonin Scalia, U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Speech, Princeton University, 1995
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Justice Holmes was explaining the shortcoming of taking words, spoken or written, literally and not looking further to try and determine the actual intent. This becomes a major legal issue when trying to determine the original intent of legislators of the framers of the Constitution. We all have written things which when interpreted to by others end up with a meaning different from what we intended. In the legislative process with the negotiations over wording, committees, and tradeoffs, it is often very hard to determine what the originators had in mind for in many situations they disagreed about the issue but ended up compromising on some specific language which might represent a consensus or might not even represent anyone’s view.
Every time a court decides on the constitutionality of something that did not exist at the founding, the meaning is enlarged somewhat. For example is hacking into a computer a violation of the Due Process clause? Are Americans who are entitled to bear arms allowed to choose any arms now existent—ie biological weapons? Is a President who is brain dead but is breathing and kept alive by artificial means to be replaced by the Vice President? The U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution of all the industrialized democracies, and yet if functions in a world the Founding Fathers would not recognize. The courts and the Amendments have kept it fundamental to our nation and still an example to the world.
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the Supreme Court's history. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 by President Donald Trump, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
