Volumes can and will be written about Scalia’s approach to the law. Even those of us who disagreed with him (as I often did, sometimes intensely) owe him an immense debt, because the clarity and power of his arguments forced us to do better.

But most of all, I mourn his loss as a person. During my first year at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was then a well-known professor, he treated me with immense kindness — sending me his rough drafts for comments, asking me to write for Regulation (the magazine he edited) and encouraging my primitive academic efforts even as he disagreed with them.

When he left Chicago to join the court of appeals in Washington, he asked me to come to his office. He said, with a paternal air and considerable shyness, that he knew I would be teaching some of his courses, and I was the one he’d like to have his files — filled with illuminating nuggets about the law, which he had accumulated over a period of many years. To a kid law professor, that was an act of extraordinary generosity, carried out quietly and with grace.

He was a great man, and a deeply good one.