Justice Kagan on Justice Scalia's Legacy (November 2015)

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Justice Kagan, delivering the Scalia Lecture on Statutory Interpretation at Harvard Law School, Nov 18 2015:

Question: You said a moment ago that Justice Scalia ushered in a change in attitude. So I guess I have two follow up questions to my last one, which are -- one, how would you characterize what your court does now -- sort of, the way of thinking about statutes? In practical terms, when you get a statutory case, how does your court approach it? And the second is -- how do you feel that Justice Scalia -- you said that he shaped this more than anyone else. So how does he shape the way that eight other justices do business?

Kagan's answer: So I think Justice Scalia is an incredibly important figure in the Court in many ways. We all sort of like to think, oh, we're Supreme Court justices, that kind of thing -- but the truth of the matter is, you wake up in a hundred years, most people are not going to know most of our names. But I think that is really not the case with Justice Scalia, who I think is going to go down as one of the most important and most historic figures in the Court. And -- there are a whole number of reasons for that, which -- this is about statutes, so let's just -- I think the primary reason for that is that Justice Scalia has taught everybody how to do statutory interpretation differently. And I really do mean, pretty much taught everybody. You know there's the classic phrase, "we're all realists now"? Well, I think we're all textualists now, in a way that just was not remotely true when Justice Scalia joined the bench.

Question: Even Justice Breyer?

Kagan: Justice Breyer might be a little bit of an outlier -- might be a little bit. In certain ways, he, too, starts with the text. Justice Scalia, for that matter, is a little bit of an outlier, is ways we can talk about, on the current Court. But I think -- sometimes he doesn't really understand how much the center of gravity has moved toward the kind of things that he's preached for quite some time, even at the same time as he's still a little bit on the edge of a spectrum. But his focus on statutory text -- on the idea that yes, Congress has written something and your job truly is to read and interpret it, and that means staring at the words on the page -- you know, it's actually remarkable to me how different that is than what it used to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpEtszFT0Tg&feature=youtu.be&t=7m38s

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