Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

The salutary rule of private life that one should not speak poorly of the recently departed does not properly apply to public persons who we know only through their public deeds. When they choose to lead a political life, which is the only capacity in which we have occasion to know them, and they have had an overwhelmingly perverse influence on the course of public affairs, a different rule must apply. If decorum counsels that we do not exactly dance on their graves, at least honest historical judgment should not be suspended or falsified for inappropriate application of rules that properly pertain to private life. Mixing of the private with the exclusively public is a common propaganda tactic.

Biographers may weave the personal attributes, the odd-fellow relationships with Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, the plutocrat junkets of the kind where he died, suspicions about that death, membership in Opus Dei, assessments of when one person’s flamboyance crossed the line to another’s buffoonish […]