This wasn’t sufficiently germane to mention in my previous post, but one other passage from the Justice Scalia interview that I particularly liked was his response after Jennifer Senior tried several times to get him to name his most “heroic” decision:
I mean the most heroic opinion—maybe the only heroic opinion I ever issued— was my statement refusing to recuse.
From the case involving Vice-President Cheney, with whom you’d gone hunting?
I thought that took some guts. Most of my opinions don’t take guts. They take smarts. But not courage. And I was proud of that. I did the right thing and it let me in for a lot of criticism and it was the right thing to do and I was proud of that. So that’s the only heroic thing I’ve done.
Here’s the opinion, by the way, if you’ve never read it. I pretty much agree with Justice Scalia’s assessment of it.
[UPDATE: Link should be fixed!]