Fanning furor, Justice Scalia says appeals court judge lied - Yahoo! News


The thrust of the article is that Supreme Court Justice Scalia claims that Circuit Judge Posner lied in claiming that Scalia deviated from his own "textual originalism" approach to case decisions, in favor of legislative history on some cases.

Textual originalism, is a rigid approach to the law which assumes that the meaning of laws do not change over time, and that judges should interpret them the same way the original people who adopted the laws did. As such, Scalia is not so much a strict conservative, as, for example Supreme Court Clarence Thomas is, but someone who tries to uphold the laws and not interpret them, and refuses to grant any rights that were not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.

But Posner points out, and I agree with him, that this approach is impossible to follow all the time, and that legislative history is inevitably used to interpret the law.