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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2017
ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW QUEENS, N.Y.
One of my favorite extra-judicial activities is meeting with law students, and it is a pleasure to be with you today. But it is a special privilege to come back to the Jamaica campus of St. John's College from which I graduated 60 years ago, long before the Law School had moved here from Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn, and when there was only one building on this former golf course.
I was honored to call Justice Scalia a role model and friend. What I hope to convey to you today, however, is the effect Justice Scalia's tenure on the United States Supreme Court had on the Court itself, other judges, and ultimately, the rule of law.
I
Two years ago, during the Antonin Scalia Lecture series at Harvard, Justice Elena Kagan declared "we're all textualists now."1 To the more recent members of the bar, Justice Kagan's words may not seem terribly profound-of course any competent lawyer knows that when construing a statute one begins with the text. i can assure you, however, that this was not always the case. For those of us who remember a time before Scalia, Justice Kagan's statement is a testament to the sea change the law has undergone in recent decades.
indeed, in the same speech, Justice Kagan explained that if someone had mentioned "statutory interpretation" to her while she was in law school, she was not sure she "would even quite have known what that meant." In those days, statutory interpretation "was not really taught as a discipline."2 Such were the Dark Ages.
For decades, law schools, the Supreme Court, and the legal profession as a whole had been hostile to conservative legal thought. This was true in 1963 when I graduated from law school during the heyday of the Warren Court, and it was still true when Justice Kagan graduated from law school in 1986-the very same year that Justice Scalia joined the high Court, and I joined the Ninth Circuit. In fact, my commission was signed by President Reagan on September 26, 1986-the very same day Judge Scalia became Justice Scalia.
At that time, as Justice Kagan explained, the approach was "what should this statute...