The Methodological Fallacy
This chapter begins the book’s basic conclusions about the reasons for Justice Antonin Scalia’s enduring historical significance in terms of understanding American constitutionalism. The first reason, the chapter argues, is that his jurisprudence and judicial career demonstrate his belief in a pervasive “methodological fallacy,” the common belief that there is some formal interpretive methodology that is capable of tightly constraining or eliminating judicial discretion and generally providing “correct” interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. Scalia claimed that his jurisprudence did this, but his career demonstrated both that his jurisprudence was deeply flawed and that his own actions were largely guided not by “objective” originalist sources but by his own ideology and politics. The chapter argues that one major reason for Scalia’s enduring historical significance is that it suggests the true nature of American constitutionalism, the fact that the Constitution is incomplete and in many ways indeterminate and that there is no formal methodology capable of producing “correct” answers to most or all disputed constitutional questions.