Scalia was "...the most important justice in American history..."

Scalia towered over John Marshall: Steven Calabresi

Supreme Court justice reshaped a misguided legal culture.

"Antonin Scalia is one of only 112 Americans to have served on the U.S. Supreme Court, but he is the most important justice in American history — greater than formerChief Justice John Marshall himself. Justice Scalia believed in following the law and in textualism. And he never misconstrued federal statutes to reach constitutional issues he wanted to decide the way Chief Justice Marshall did in famous cases like Marbury v. Madison and in Gibbons v. Ogden. 

Justice Scalia will be remembered for his commitment to the principle that judges should be guided in deciding cases by the original public meaning of the texts that they are interpreting. He has totally reshaped the legal culture so that today there is much less use of legislative history and much more reliance on the constitutional text than there was prior to his elevation to the Supreme Court in 1986.  Even liberal justices like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan often joined Justice Scalia’s opinion or wrote textualist opinions that Justice Scalia could join. Scalia has fundamentally and forever reshaped the way Americans will think about law."