On February 13, 2016, Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was found dead at the age of 79 at a ranch in Shafter, Texas. Scalia was one of the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices, and was widely regarded as the intellectual linchpin for originalist and textualist interpretations of the Constitution. He was also widely regarded—both by those who supported and who opposed his views—as one of the United States’ most brilliant legal minds. His staunch positions on many of the social issues brought to the Supreme Court placed him firmly within the public eye in a way that other Justices are not, and for that, Scalia took an awful lot of heat from his detractors. And yet, he was known as a great friend of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and even comedian Stephen Colbert—who often made jokes at Scalia’s expense—had a touching story about Scalia’s sense of humor and humanity when Scalia was the lone person in the crowd who complimented Colbert on his edgy and controversial performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner.
Almost immediately after Scalia’s death was announced, there was a lot of grave dancing by his detractors whose condemnation of Scalia as a hatemonger was more than a little ironic. But the reaction from the other political extreme was even more puzzling, as various supporters opined online that Scalia’s death during an election year must surely be some kind of political assassination plot by liberals. It was the kind of notion that sounds crazy, and yet, one looks around and sees a lot of people nodding their heads in a sort of collective, “maybe.”
