Justice & Law Quote by Antonin Scalia

Scalia is mid-eye-roll here, turning a dissent into a warning label. The clipped “completes the process” frames the Court’s ruling not as a discrete mistake but as the final click in a long ratchet: a statute, he suggests, has been steadily repurposed by judicial interpretation. That phrasing matters. It’s not just disagreement with an outcome; it’s an accusation that the Court has been quietly rewriting the deal Congress struck in 1964.

The line’s bite comes from its inversion of Title VII’s promise. Where the law is popularly understood as a shield against decisions “based on” race or sex, Scalia implies the Court has made those very categories increasingly relevant - not to protect individuals from discrimination, but to justify race- or sex-conscious policies in the name of remedying it. The subtext is classic Scalia: anti-discrimination law, in his telling, has drifted into a kind of managed inequality, where the state must notice and sort people by the traits it once vowed to ignore.

Contextually, this sits inside his broader project: policing the boundary between statutory text and judicially constructed doctrine (disparate impact, affirmative action, or expansive readings of “because of” depending on the case). The sentence is also performative: it recruits the reader’s suspicion of bureaucratic creep and elite moralizing. By presenting the Court as completing a “process,” Scalia casts himself as the last adult in the room, watching a simple guarantee morph into an engine for outcomes-based social engineering.