from Kenneth Stars in the WSJ, Gorsuch Gets  Comfortable in Scalia’s Chair:

When Scalia ascended to the high court in 1986, he saw the danger of a runaway judiciary, as embodied in the Warren Court and to a lesser extent the Burger Court. The judges were “making it up” as they went along. Justice Gorsuch used those words in his first oral argument, a case involving a complex interplay of federal statutes. Like Scalia, Justice Gorsuch searched for an authoritative answer in the text alone. That approach, textualism, was Scalia’s way of restoring the judiciary’s proper role.

In contrast to Scalia, Justice Gorsuch came of age as a lawyer not in the freewheeling Warren Court era, but during the more judicially restrained leadership of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. By that time, the Federalist Society was going strong, and Scalia’s approach was increasingly in favor: The written Constitution was law, not moral philosophy.

At his confirmation hearing, he called Scalia a mentor who “reminded us that words matter—that the judge’s job is to follow the words that are in the law, not replace them with those that aren’t.”

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