Justice Antonin Scalia (1936-2016) - R.I.P.

Gary Martin and Guillermo Contreras, "U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia found dead at West Texas ranch" (My San Antonio, February 13, 2016):

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead of apparent natural causes Saturday on a luxury resort in West Texas, federal officials said. Scalia, 79, was a guest at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, a resort in the Big Bend region south of Marfa. Scalia arrived at the 30,000-acre ranch on Friday and attended a private party with about 40 people that night, according to a federal official.

Yes, I know, this will give the regnant Evil Empire another chance to appoint a nefarious antinomian justice, but I'm not interested in that now. Whatever his personal defects (such as his too easy acceptance of legal positivism in his juridical practice), he is a man who will be missed. As a reader suggests, "We will not see another like him."

Here is an older piece by a liberal that raises a very good point; amidst misreadings of Scalia, comments that are themselves very telling: Dahlia Lithwick, "No. No. Not That I Know Of" (Slate, October 7, 2013) -- excerpt:

Much has been made of the fact that Scalia admits in the piece that the only newspapers he and his wife have delivered are the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. The radio he listens to is “talk guys, usually,” especially Bill Bennett, because they “keep off stupid people.” He also says that it’s unusual for him to listen to NPR and that he “used to get the Washington Post, but it just … went too far for me. I couldn’t handle it anymore.” He contends that the Post’s coverage of “almost any conservative issue … was slanted and often nasty.” And that he decided not to bother anymore because “why should I get upset every morning?” The Post, he concludes, had become “shrilly, shrilly liberal.”

He shuns the State of the Union every year because it is “a childish spectacle.” He isn’t sure he has any gay friends, but insists that “I have friends that I know, or very much suspect, are homosexual. Everybody does.” When asked by Senior if any have come out to him, Scalia says, “No. No. Not that I know of.” Stop and consider, for a moment, how difficult it would be in a major American city in 2013 to construct a social world in which you might not know anybody who’s openly gay. And, perhaps most tellingly, when Scalia needs to get “outside the Beltway with people of the sort I had never known before,” it’s to hang out with hunters who “live in the woods. Give ’em a gun, they could survive in the woods on their own.” (This is precisely what Justice Clarence Thomas does when he undertakes his summer NASCAR tours.) In other words, when Scalia craves ideological diversity, he goes out and meets real Americans who hate shrill liberals as much as he does.

Apparently he was spending time with some of those friends outside the beltway whose company he actually enjoyed. A prayer for the repose of his soul ...

[Hat tip to JM]