Justice & Law Quote by Antonin Scalia

Scalia’s line is a cold splash of water on a recurring American fantasy: that courts exist to rescue us from our own policy mistakes. “A law can be both economic folly and constitutional” draws a bright, deliberately irritating boundary between wisdom and legality, and it’s meant to. The sentence works because it refuses the comforting idea that “bad” automatically equals “unlawful.” In Scalia’s hands, that refusal is less a civics lesson than a power move: don’t smuggle your preferred economics into the Constitution and call it neutral principle.

The specific intent is judicial modesty with an edge. Scalia is signaling that the proper target for “folly” is the ballot box, not the bench. He’s also policing his colleagues and critics: if you want to strike down legislation, you need a constitutional hook, not a lecture from Econ 101. It’s an argument against using substantive due process, “reasonableness” tests, or other elastic doctrines as a backdoor for technocratic governance.

Subtext: democracy includes the right to be wrong. Voters can pick policies that economists hate; legislatures can pass kludgy compromises; and the Constitution, in Scalia’s view, is not a national efficiency manual. That framing flatters popular sovereignty while quietly insulating conservative jurisprudence from accusations of indifference: he’s not defending the policy, just the limits of judicial power.

Context matters because Scalia was writing in the long shadow of the Lochner era, when the Court struck down labor laws on contested economic theory. His quip is a warning label on that history: the judiciary is at its most dangerous when it confuses its own confidence with constitutional command.