Was Scalia truly a "dedicated public servant"? Or was he a biased bully who had no self-awareness?

I did not like Justice Antonin Scalia, and it baffled me that he and the totally admirable Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were close personal friends.   He also is said to have reached out in kindness to Elena Kagan when she was first appointed to the court and took her duck hunting.   There must have been something likeable about him that I did not see.

As a member of the Supreme Court whose decisions I almost always disagreed with (at least those that were controversial and made the news), I thought he was a bigoted bully who had no self-awareness.   He famously said that he never let his emotions enter into his decisions about the law.   Perhaps he honestly believed that -- which is what convinces me that he had no self-awareness.   That is simply not true . . . about anyone.

That belief is probably what allowed him to justify not recusing himself from cases where he clearly had a conflict of interest.   Some who knew him say that he did at times adhere to a strict, originalist, textual reading of the Constitution, even when the resulting opinion was the opposite of what he would have liked. 

Maybe so, but I can also point to cases where he obviously should have recused himself, and didn't -- e.g., when he accepted a ride on Air Force 2 with VP Cheney to go on a hunting trip, at a time when a case against Cheney was coming up before the court. 

With prejudice, we tend not to see our own blind spots.    This was, in my opinion, startlingly true about Scalia.    What most helps combat that bias is knowing what your blind spots are and admitting them to yourself.   Scalia apparently never did.

Now is the time that I should pause and acknowledge that I am biased when it comes to Antonin Scalia:  (1) because I disagreed so thoroughly with his originalist and textualist ways of interpreting the Constitution, and (2) because he was a bigot and a blustering bully, characteristics I particularly abhor.  Because of my bias, I try extra hard, in writing about him, to make sure that my facts are correct and back up what I'm saying.

One particular disagreement I had with him was over his opposition to the recent SCOTUS decision that legalized marriage equality.   If Scalia had voted in that case consistent with some of his previous decisions, he should have voted in favor of it.   Instead he wrote a scathing denunciation of the majority opinion with which he disagreed, ignoring his own precedent votes that, in my view, rested on the same underlying constitutional principle.

This week, I have tried not to rejoice in the death of another human being, but I do agree with Clarence Darrow, who said:

"I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” 

Ralph