I certainly wouldn’t want to leave the impression that Bruce Hay’s idiotic viciousness strikes me as at all typical of the attitude of Justice Scalia’s liberal clerks toward him. Far from it. Far more representative, I think, is this admiring (and admirable) Washington Post piece by Tara Kole, titled “I’m a liberal lawyer. Clerking for Scalia taught me how to think about the law.” Some excerpts:

Justice Scalia was the person for whom I most wanted to work, not because we were ideologically aligned, but because we were not. It had to do with the way he was so deeply vilified — both personally, and as a jurist — by so many of my classmates. He was discussed in almost cartoonish fashion, conjuring images of twirled mustaches and barely-concealed devil horns. It was a time, just after Bush v. Gore and 9/11, when battle lines had been drawn, and it was politically correct to reject wholesale any belief that was not your own.
That approach made me uncomfortable, and I found myself becoming more and more interested in Justice Scalia’s work, eager to understand how someone so clearly brilliant could see the world so differently than I did. It’s why I took the job….
If there was a true surprise during my year clerking for Scalia, it was how little reference he made to political outcomes. What he cared about was the law, and where the words on the page took him. More than any one opinion, this will be his lasting contribution to legal thought. Whatever our beliefs, he forced lawyers and scholars to engage on his terms — textual analysis and original meaning. He forced us all to acknowledge that words cannot mean anything we want them to mean; that we have to impose a degree of discipline on our thinking. A discipline I value to this day.