A few years back, during oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia asked me when I thought “the bad old days” — when the Supreme Court routinely looked beyond the text of statutes — had ended?  I said, “The bad old days ended when you got on the court, Mr. Justice Scalia.” I liked giving him that answer. Not only was it substantively responsive, but it was also a good day indeed when Justice Scalia joined the court.  It would be easy to dismiss this as flattery from a former law clerk who, as solicitor general, was trying to get the justice’s vote. But Justice John Paul Stevens made the same point in a different oral argument. In Arlington Central School District Board of Education v. Murphy, the court was interpreting a statute enacted in 1986. When a school board lawyer tried to dismiss some unfavorable legislative history and focus instead on the plain text of the statute, Justice Stevens objected that “the rule that you cannot look at the legislative history didn’t really get any emphasis till after 1987.”  That year is, of course, when Justice Scalia started writing opinions for the court emphasizing the importance of statutory text and the unreliability of legislative history, and that made all the difference.  Justice Scalia’s influence extended to fundamental questions of how to interpret the Constitution. He advocated a focus on the original public meaning of the constitutional text. The ascendancy of his view was most obvious in the 2008 gun-control case District of Columbia v. Heller, not just because four justices agreed with him that the original public meaning of the Second Amendment protected an individual right, but also because all nine justices focused on text and history. The entire debate took place on Justice Scalia’s terms.  Justice Scalia fundamentally changed oral argument before the Supreme Court. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it was common for Supreme Court advocates to be asked only a handful of questions while presenting their cases. When Justice Scalia joined the court, he started asking questions in his first argument and never stopped. Other justices followed suit, and things have never been the same.  Argument before the Supreme Court is now the art of answering questions. And Justice Scalia’s questions were pointed and inimitable. He came to each argument fully prepared to engage with counsel. To paraphrase the justice, when it was time for to oral argument, “this wolf came as a wolf.”  Every lawyer had fair warning that they should be meticulously prepared — and tread carefully when relying on legislative history. But even as Justice Scalia made oral argument an intellectual affair, he made clear it need not be dour. He injected humor into his exchanges with counsel and asked many questions with a twinkle in his eye. He was routinely ranked the court’s funniest justice as judged by the court reporter’s need to note “(laughter)” in the oral argument transcript.  In a 2007 argument on taxpayer standing, the justice badgered me mercilessly on why I did not follow my argument to its logical end and fully embrace the position — that taxpayers didn’t have standing — he had long championed. We went back and forth, at times tensely. Justice Samuel Alito then jumped in, and I clarified that I was only reconciling the court’s discordant cases. Justice Scalia said: “Why didn’t you say so? I’ve been trying to make sense out of what you’re saying.” Followed, of course, by “(laughter).”  His influence extended well beyond the court. An entire generation of law students learned the law, in large part, by reading Scalia opinions. And given the clarity of his memorable prose style, his opinions have a disproportionate impact. I have had scores of law students, across the ideological spectrum, confess that they always read the Scalia opinion first — whether majority, dissent or concurrence. And it is hard to blame them. Who would rather read about some dry, multipronged doctrinal test than about 60,000 naked Hoosiers (in his nude-dancing opinion) or even just nine people selected at random from the Kansas City phone book (addressing the relative competence of the nine justices to decide right-to-die issues)? And his colorful prose could have serious consequences — I am not sure the Lemon test on religion and the First Amendment ever recovered from Justice Scalia comparing it to a B-movie ghoul.  The justice had a profound personal effect on every one of his hapless law clerks, myself included. One of the great joys of the clerkship was that so much of the interaction with the justice was through conversation. I suppose that was partly by necessity. He certainly did not need law clerks to help him with his opinions. Indeed, I often suspected that the only reason he bothered asking us for drafts was that he did not know how to format a WordPerfect document.  But he always engaged his clerks in a vigorous discussion of the cases, which resembled nothing so much as an oral argument before the court. I remember, just a few years after my clerkship, rather recklessly telling a prominent general counsel that he was wrong on a legal matter and offering an alternative theory on the issue. As I walked out after the encounter, I wondered where I summoned the courage to confront such an important client. The only explanation that occurred to me is the one that must occur to every Scalia clerk and every lawyer who has argued before the justice — once you have tangled with Justice Scalia on a legal question, nothing else in the law can be truly intimidating.  Paul Clement was solicitor general of the United States from 2005 to 2008 and a law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia in 1992-93.  Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
What it was like to clerk for, and present cases to, the most intimidating of Supreme Court justices.