The Influence Of Scalia On The Supreme Court Of The United States

The Supreme Court of the United States serves as the judicial body that interprets the implementation of the U.S. Constitution. Over the years, this Court as a whole has made some landmark decisions, forever altering the direction of our country. However, the Court is a sum of its parts, in which each individual justice has a say in the outcome of each case. Today, the Court is made up of one Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices. While there is no set standard on how the justices are to cast their vote, there are several common constitutional interpretation styles justices tend to utilize. Such styles include original intent, stare decisis, pragmatism, textualism, original meaning, polling jurisdiction, and structural analysis (Epstein
He was a skilled writer and blessed with a natural wit about him (“Antonin Scalia”). He was a very popular justice in which individuals usually either, “deeply admired or highly resented” him (Boyd 4). He served on the court for twenty-nine years before his passing (Totenberg). As you will see in the following pages, Justice Scalia was a prominent thinker on the Supreme Court who was passionate about the law. Influenced by his strict Catholic upbringing, Scalia was an originalist who often used textualism, original intent, and stare decisis to interpret constitutional cases. Scalia classified himself as an originalist. He stated, “I am one of a small but hardy group of judges and academics in the United States who subscribe to the principle of constitutional interpretation known as originalism. Originalists believe that the provisions of the Constitution have a fixed meaning when they are adopted, nothing more, and nothing less.”(Scalia 188). Many people support the idea of the living constitution, but Scalia was not one of them. He interpreted and applied the constitution as if it were
The case of Gonzales v Raich (2005) focuses on the limits of the commerce power. In this case, California allowed its citizens to grow and use marijuana for medical purposes. However, the federal government did not allow the growing or use of marijuana for medical purposes. So whenever county sheriffs and federal drug agents entered an individual's home, the individual was not charged locally, but the federal agents seized and destroyed the marijuana because the individual was in violation of the Controlled Substances Act. The individual has been sued. The Court ruled the Congress had the power to regulate the possession of medical marijuana per the Controlled Substances Act. Scalia wrote the concurring opinion using stare decisis. Throughout Scalia’s opinion in Gonzales v Raich (2005), he states that the question of whether or not marijuana should be used for medical use is not for the court to decide