Daily Inspiration Quote by Antonin Scalia

Scalia is doing what he did best: turning an argument about interpretive method into a warning about power, dressed in the plain language of common sense. The line starts with a sly hypothetical - "If we're picking people" - that pretends to be procedural, even modest. Then it pivots into the real target: the temptation to treat constitutional interpretation as a personality test. Once "conscience and experience" become the raw materials for a "new" Constitution, expertise stops meaning legal discipline and starts meaning ideological reliability. The acid punchline lands with "We should look to people who agree with us" - a deliberately blunt admission of what Scalia thinks is usually left polite and unspoken.

The subtext is less about lawyers than about legitimacy. Scalia is arguing that a Constitution that can be continually "drawn out" of judges is not a constraint on politics; it's a ventriloquist's dummy. His jab at "good lawyers" is strategic: legal skill, in his view, is supposed to tether judges to text, history, and limiting principles. If the job becomes moral improvisation, the selection criteria shifts from competence to tribal alignment, and the Court becomes another elected branch without elections.

Context matters: this is classic late-20th-century conservative jurisprudence, forged in reaction to the Warren Court and the idea of a "living Constitution". Scalia frames interpretive creativity not as compassion but as a mechanism for turning contested social outcomes into judicial fait accompli. "Rendered the Constitution useless" is the closing threat: not that the document disappears, but that it becomes infinitely pliable - and therefore incapable of saying "no" to anyone with enough votes on the bench.