Scalia’s Teaching Methods and Message

Abstract

As a judge, Justice Scalia famously adhered to a textualist and originalist approach in service of republican constitutionalism. As an educator, he criticized dominant trends in legal education. The inter-related nature of those two arguments and the deeper roots of his constitutionalism are best stated in a largely forgotten lecture that Scalia delivered to a Catholic audience in late 1986, just months after his appointment to the Supreme Court. The themes presented in that lecture—to which Justice Scalia returned in his last public speech, nearly three decades later—illuminate points he pressed in some of his judicial opinions on issues of education law.