A first way in which Scalia achieved this remarkable feat was through the sheer force of his language. Summing up Scalia’s influence in 2003, NPR’s Nina Totenberg accurately explained that he had “failed” to secure a majority in many high-profile cases but nevertheless had “changed the terms of the debate.”

Scalia did this with different tools. For example, he excoriated his colleagues’ habit of using committee reports and floor statements from Congress as a guide for interpreting federal statutes. In the early 1980s, scholars could speak of the “almost absolute acceptance” of such evidence. But in a series of brutal concurring and dissenting opinions — eight in his first three years — Scalia heaped scorn on these documents as “frail” and constitutionally deficient. His campaign was so prominent, and so relentless, that he succeeded in embarrassing his colleagues out of using legislative history. Indeed, this was the beginning of a larger tectonic shift in how federal courts read statutes — ignoring contextual evidence of what Congress intended — that continues to be felt in major cases, from rulings on Biden’s vaccine mandate to the reach of employment discrimination law.

Scalia’s tactic is eminently portable. Indeed, Justice Neil Gorsuch is now using much the same approach to challenge the court’s long-standing habit of bowing to administrative agencies’ understandings of ambiguous federal law. Gorsuch has gone to such lengths as writing a separate opinion to criticize this practice even when the Supreme Court decides not to hear the case in which it’s at issue.