Hello and welcome to Amicus, Slate Supreme Court podcast.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick and I cover the court for Slate.

On the last regular episode of this show, you may recall that we talked about how little play

the Supreme Court was getting in this presidential election, despite

how really important it is? Well, what a difference a couple of weeks can make.

The surprise death just last weekend of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has really sent shockwaves

through the country, not only reshaping the contours of this election, but potentially

shifting the ideological balance of the court, and triggering a constitutional game of chicken between President Obama and the Republican-controlled Senate.

Now, however this all plays out, you can be sure that we're at the very beginning of a democratic and constitutional soap opera that will represent the perfect dramatic capstone to Justice Scalia's larger-than-life career and persona.

You have by now surely heard many very, very smart people teasing out the possibilities for what happens next in what's sure to be a very long process of replacing Justice Scalia on the bench.

You've also probably heard a lot of partisan bickering about who he was, what his legacy is,

and how you should feel the way I feel about Justice Scalia all the time.

We thought on today's episode of Amicus, we'd stay away from some of that and stick to the facts.

So we're going to set aside the political gamesmanship.

We're even going to set aside the ideological yelling, and we're going to spend a little time instead, reflecting on who Antonin Scalia really was, both as a legal thinker and as a colleague and mentor. Later on in the show, we're going to

be joined by one of his former clerks to talk about what it was like to work in his chambers. But first,

we're going to dig down into Justice Scalia's intellectual and doctrinal legacy at the court.

People have been throwing around words like originalism and textualism and strict construction

all week long,

but what do they mean? Joining us from his New Haven office to help think through some of these

big questions is one of the people who has profoundly shaped my own view of the law and that of so many

others. Akil Rita Marr, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University,

...