Life Lessons From Justice Scalia

Be honest, even when it makes life more difficult; don’t wall your mind off from opposing views; and don’t be anxious about tomorrow. These are some of the life lessons that a former clerk says he learned while working for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away a year ago. “Justice Scalia was not only a great judge; he was also a profoundly good man,” Ryan J. Walsh writes in the National Review. “More than his personality or his jurisprudence, his character – that quality of soul forged by a lifetime of choices – seemed most to anchor and account for all that he did, both on and off the court.” The justice, affectionately called Nino was famed to have a close relationship with his colleague, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, though the two are at opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. That can be attributed to Scalia’s philosophical approach to disagreement, Walsh writes. “[E]ven when he was convinced to a certainty that he was correct (which was not infrequently), he thought he owed it to the parties and his colleagues to engage their counterrarguments fairly and fully, and to document that engagement in his opinion for all to see,” Walsh writes. One line that Scalia was known to repeat may have summed up his day-to-day credo: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”