From a reader, commenting on this week’s Uncommon Knowledge interview with Antonin Scalia:

Mr. Robinson –
In your excerpt from your interview with Justice Scalia was the following exchange:
Scalia: “I’m not a great believer in legacy.” Robinson: “Then what is the point of writing dissents?” Scalia: “Not to get a legacy. To get the thing right—to get the society to turn back to a proper interpretation of the Constitution….We had a wonderful thing here. We have a wonderful thing here. I truly believe it cannot continue if we turn over so much of our democratic self-governance—so much of what makes us great—to unelected judges.
I wanted to write you about this short exchange because it’s just so important. I went to law school at a third-tier small school in Salem, Oregon. (Willamette). It’s the kind of small law school that serves places like Oregon well. A lot of our grads are on the bench here and, even though people outside of Oregon are likely to not know the school or even pronounce its name correctly, it’s an imporant institution in the Oregon bar. That bar, and Willamette, are both very liberal institutionally.
At the time I attended Willamette, there was no conservative majority on the Supreme Court and to the extent one read Justice Scalia’s opinions in Con Law there were almost always dissents.
I cannot overstate—literally, I cannot overstate—how critically important these dissents were to the education of my fellow law students. Time and time again I saw my fellow students wrestle with the ideas and positions put forth by Scalia in dissent and, given their force, their power, their logic and their reasoning, again and again I saw liberals, for the first time in their lives, begin to ask serious questions about the wisdom of the majority legal culture. I even saw more than a few begin to change their minds on key issues and, liberal professors aside, the cumulative effect of the dissents was to bring to the fore in the students’ minds key issues of federalism and the proper role of the judiciary in our system of government.
Even largely in dissent, I can think of no other single Supreme Court justice who had as large an impact in shaping the Con Law views of my fellow students. The guy is a gem, a justice who I firmly believe will go down in Supreme Court history as one of the most important justices ever to serve.