OK, I'm not really a fan of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's ideology, but I am reading the decision he wrote for the court in District of Columbia vs. Heller, and man this is one tight piece of work. Logical, precise, yet not drowned in minutia, and remarkably human. I have often wondered what the arguments of a constructionist would look like ... well now I know.

His work of going back to the world of the founders (and before, into England in the 1600s) and decoding the common meanings and ideas of the day is spellbinding. He establishes, link-by-link, a chain of legislation and jurisprudence leading inexorably from the Bill of Rights to the pleadings in D.C. vs. Heller. When, at the end of sixty four pages of argument, he tells D.C. to take its gun ban and stuff it, you can almost hear Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Ben Franklin, and all the antifederalists shuffling on the floorboards behind him. This thing is awesome.

I have a feeling that I might not like the results, but I would be interested in seeing what Justice Scalia would have written in 1972 on Roe vs. Wade.

And, yes, I do read this sort of thing for fun.