A Man Who Has Been Speaking Prose All His Life

In his latest column, Hadley Arkes writes about Justice Antonin Scalia's wit and wisdom that he has extolled during his years of service on the Supreme Court.  In particular, Arkes points out that Scalia, a self-declared debunker of the natural law, has curiously been drawing from natural law teachings all along.  Arkes explains more:

In the banter and laughing – and arguments – over the years, he has tilted with some of his friends over the matter of “natural law.” The Justice has been famously dubious, at times scathing. My own argument has been that he has shown us handsomely, in his work, how a jurisprudence of natural law may be done, even while professing up and down that it cannot be done. As Aristotle noted, the distinct nature of human beings is marked by the capacity to give and understand reasons over matters of right and wrong. As Aristotle saw, there is something approaching the divine in the capacity to grasp propositions not bounded by space and time, truths that would hold in all times and places and not decompose, as all material things decompose. 

The natural law may be shown in the disciplined engagement of the “laws of reason” in the cases that come before us. My friend has boasted that he had never taken a course in logic, and yet he has been the most relentless logician on the Supreme Court. And he has done the most important work of natural law as he has challenged, in the most demanding way, the premises that the Court has put in place as it removed protections of the law from unborn children, created novel licenses in sexuality, and undermined support for marriage as an institution.

While not every single opinion and dissent authored by Scalia is in line with the natural law--and in fact, much of his public teachings contradict the natural law--, he nonetheless shows the beginnings of what a natural law jurisprudence should look like (Clarence Thomas's jurisprudence is much closer in line with the natural law, e.g., see his concurrence in Adarand v. Pena where he quotes directly from the natural law teachings of the Declaration of Independence).