[from source:] The “rock star” of the court showed little interest in compromise but still changed the way the Constitution and laws are interpreted.
Source: Justice Antonin Scalia and the ‘Dead’ Constitution – The New York Times
Since Scalia’s passing there has been frequent mention of his devotion to originalism, the idea (quoting Wikipedia) that “…views the Constitution’s meaning as fixed as of the time of enactment.”
I immediately thought of two things I’ve studied a bit (neither of them involving constitutional law!): religion and environment. And in both cases there are shades of originalism: one need only look at Scalia’s religious views to get a starter sense of that immediate connection, whereas among certain environmental advocates there is a sort of “nature before culture showed up” originalism, framed in numinous fashion as “the wild” (e.g., this book)—or, more loftily, there is the epistemological equivalent, that now-long-in-tooth science wars-era anti-constructivist “nature is real, dammit!” argument (e.g., this book…interesting that both of them were published via Island Press).
Twenty years separates these two books, but the basic argument remains. I published on that earlier book quite a few years ago myself; hopefully this fall I’ll have time during sabbatical to write on why originalism is such a perennial tendency in American environmentalism.