This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 16th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Supreme Court Justice Anton and Scalia, who died this weekend, was not a libertarian, that his legacy

will be in changing how students, scholars, even his fellow justices argue about the Constitution

and its meaning.

Cato Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies, Ilia Shapiro comments.

Justice Scalia is the most consequential jurist, certainly of my lifetime and probably before that, he bestrode the court like a

Colossus, agree with him or not, attention had to be paid. It's hard to imagine the Supreme Court

without his looming presence either literally inside the courtroom asking

questions or his words on the page.

There's a whole book devoted to his dissents, Scalia dissents it's called,

and eventually those dissents starting turning into more majority and concurring opinions.

He's best known for reviving or heralding the Renaissance of originalism and textualism. That is that the Constitution should be interpreted

according to its original meaning, not according to the policy preferences of judges, not according to how it evolves or how each generation

re-ratifies it or whatever it might be the case, but actually get out the dictionaries,

look at the Federalist papers, look at what the term equal protection means in

1868 at the ratification of the 14th Amendment, that sort of thing.

And now it's like we're all originalists or at least we have to pay lip service to it

Look for example to justice Sotomayor's testimony at her confirmation hearing

No one thinks she's an originalist but she had to talk that

way. Or the Scalia's own majority opinion, probably my favorite, in Heller, the Second Amendment case confirming that the Second Amendment protects

an individual right to keep and bear arms.

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