He'd bemoan the lack of civility in society, and yet no justice was more

caustic or sarcastic in his opinions. I mean the kinds of things that he wrote

were things that you just don't normally hear in Supreme Court opinions.

Hi and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slates Podcast about the courts and the law and the rule of law.

I'm Dylithwick. I cover many, if not most, of those things for Slate.

And as we contemplate the shape of the court in light of Justice Kennedy's retirement,

there's been an awful lot of speculation out there that Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee

may bear a remarkable ideological resemblance to the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

So with that in mind, I wanted to bring you a conversation about the legacy and intellectual

history of Justice Scalia. With the caveat that we taped this a little bit before Justice Kennedy

made his announcement, that said this is an incredibly useful way to think about this

Antonin Scalia-sized hole at the Supreme Court that Donald Trump will be trying to fill this

September. Rick Hassan is a friend of Amicus and he's appeared on this show to talk about voting

rights and gerrymandering many times. He teaches law and political science at UC Irvine School of Law.

But this conversation is not about voting. It's about the mind of Antonin Scalia and it is from

his latest book, The Justice of Contradictions Antonin Scalia and The Politics of Disruption,

which was published this past spring. So welcome back to the podcast, Rick Hassan.

Thank you. It's always great to be with you. So I love the premise of your book, which is that

Scalia kind of prefigures Donald Trump in a lot of important ways. He's a disruptor. He

comes in and he reshapes the whole judicial branch with his whole name-calling, bombastic,

anti-alitas, populist thing. And he was doing it long before Donald Trump made it cool. That's

the premise, correct? Yeah, that's one of the premises. I might say the other one is that he

...