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.