This isn't really directed at you, but it seems like a good place to address the crowd.

I didn't say the man was a saint or that he was always perfectly intellectually honest all the time. No one is.

But I think was a lot more of those things than he often got credit for. Some of you seem to forget that people who have different opinions than you are also people. And as such, they have the right to try to get those opinions represented. Scalia's attitude towards torture was repulsive in my opinion. But he represents the attitudes of a very large number of real people.

It's not like he's some kind of singular monster or something.

As for saying crass things, giving people shit when maybe he shouldn't have, well, we've all done that too.

I figure if there's one day you can cut a guy a little slack, it's the day he dies. Sheesh, if you can't find one tiny little positive thing to say about the man, I suggest that you aren't even trying. It's not like the man was pure evil.

I further suggest that you say nothing at all if you honestly can't think of anything good about him.

The vitriol in much of this thread is utterly tasteless and shameful.

Glenn Greenwald:

“This demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous. That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power.”

“...the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. [...] Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death.”

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/margare...

If you want to attack a person based on his professional life, you are free to do that. But I don't think that's appropriate here. Maybe take it to Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or something?

I'm not demanding that people shut up for all eternity and never criticize the opinions Scalia wrote. In this context, I think the Greenwald quote is a strawman. I've already made it clear that I disagreed with Scalia on many points.

But attacking a person on the day that he died is tasteless no matter what you think of him or her.

And I don't think there's really much to attack Justice Scalia on in terms of his personal life anyway. He was a close personal friend of the Notorious RBG, a devoted husband to one wife, Maureen, and father of 9 children.

Is that propagandistic whitewashing? No. It is not. Some people value it when politicians and judges live the life they assert publicly is the best possible life.

I don't want that life and don't agree that it's the best. But the man put his life where his mouth was.

The idea that a judge, or any Justice is just the sum of their soundbites regarding only the most highly media-ized opinions is truly preposterous.

Yes, I think Scalia came down on the wrong side of Citizens United, and also Obergefell. And there are others that I could cite where I disagree with him.

But there are many I could agree with, like Smith, where he strongly opined that the law needed a clearer use of plain language, and in fact, Scalia was one of the first on the Court to advocate plain English in legislation, contracts, and Court briefs.

I've edited hundreds of hours of video interviews with the Court on the topic of plain English in the realms, and it is clear to me that Scalia was the driving force that literally changed the Court's opinions on acceptable prose.

His influence on the language of the Court alone should win him a medal of some sort. Because this is good for everyone, not just partisans who happened to appeal to his politics.

Legal scholars and attorneys all over the country will be parsing and analyzing his jurisprudence for decades to come. There is no danger that people are going to stop thinking about the ways in which he was right or wrong.

Suggesting that people who ask to give it a day, or parse the decisions instead of the man is not misguided or dangerous. Greenwald is way off base here.

What I'm suggesting is that, like many of us, Justice Scalia was a man acting in good faith, serving his country at one of the highest levels. Regardless of how much you agree or disagree with his decisions, he was a human being and deserves a little respect.

And this is coming from someone who disagreed with him often.

The man was a human being. Perhaps wrong sometimes. Perhaps right sometimes. He does not deserve personal vitriol on the day of his death. Unless he turns out to be Hitler in disguise, I'm not sure he deserves personal attacks at all.

That is rich, considering the source.

With respect, this appears to me a content-free reply. Greenwald is making a serious argument in the article I quoted from. Are you being dismissive of the argument or (as it would appear) the source, the author. If the latter, maybe you can more fully explain why and also why dismissing the source dismisses the argument.

I'm suggesting that Greenwald has no problems with hagiography when the subjects are politically useful to him.

I'd love to see these people dealing with their every action criticized through their whole life. Now when he dies they can't stop piling on.

It's one thing to not speak ill of the dead, but you're complaining about a judge having their judgements judged.

The key distinction is between criticizing Scalia's judgements, which many if not most of us would, and denouncing him a human being. The latter is a problem on HN because it rapidly degrades the discourse below the level we hope for.

I also think that a little self-observation is enough to reveal (a) the rather ugly motives behind that mechanism, and (b) how we would each consider it unfair in our own case.

> And as such, they have the right to try to get those opinions represented.

At best, Scalia represented the opinions of an opinionated and influential but not truly representative minority of the population.

Now - there's nothing in the constitution that says explicitly that the Supreme Court should be a representative body.

But the political reality is that judges aren't picked for the SC because they're the best legal minds of their generation - they're chosen for their legal minds and for their politics.

IMO, in a representative democracy, the political values of the judiciary and especially of the SC should be broadly similar to those of the population.

Did Scalia bring the SC closer to the values of the median population, or did he move it away from the median?

This seems to make sense but it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to drag society forward when society's inertia is at odds with the Constitution. For example, 90% of people didn't support interracial marriage when the Supreme Court legalised it. If the bench's political values were the same as the general population, that would never have happened.

It was closer to 80%, and on a question of disapproval of[1], not illegality. I may disapprove of your misquoting stats, but that doesn't mean I want you to go to jail for it. Also the majority of population lived in a state where interracial marriage was legal since before 1940, and by 1967 the only states that have miscegenation laws were the ones apt to fly Dixie. It was not so much about dragging against inertia, unless by inertia you mean stalemate—the South would never have repealed those laws.

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh...

My apologies, I misread the the Gallup graph because the one I saw didn't have 1968 marked. Anyhow, my point stands. It would not have been legalised if the bench voted like the general population did.

No, that doesn't follow at all. Loving was a criminal case. The poll is about "disapproval". Again, I disapprove of your lack of logic at this small hour, but I would never want you to go to jail over it ;-)

> This seems to make sense but it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to drag society forward when society's inertia is at odds with the Constitution.

I don't see where it says that in Article III of the Constitution. Can you point it out to me?

I didn't say the court has a need or obligation to representative. I said that there are real people who believe the same things Scalia did.

Those people, minority or not, have as much of a right to try to elect people who are like them and and gain support for what they think is right as you do.