O n February 13, 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia passed away unexpectedly at the age of 79, vacating a seat on the Supreme Court which he had held for nearly 30 years. Justice Scalia's lengthy tenure on the Court, coupled with his strongly held views on how constitutional and statutory texts are to be interpreted, led him to have significant influence on the development of the jurisprudence in various areas of law. He also was an active speaker and author outside the Court, having, among other things, recently coauthored a book which sought to articulate interpretative canons that would, in its authors' view, "curb—even reverse—the te ndency of judges to imbue authoritative texts with their own policy preferences" and "provide greater certainty in the law, and hence greater predictability and greater respect for the rule of law." Like his approaches to many legal issues in his opinions, Justice Scalia's approach to statutory interpretation in this book has prompted debate both over its desirability, as a normative matter, and over the consistency with which Justice Scalia applied that approach, among other things. This report discusses Justice Scalia's jurisprudence on key areas of law, as well as how that jurisprudence could be seen to have influenced the Court's approach to these subject matters. It begins with his views on two cross-cutting issues—the role of the judiciary and statutory interpretation—which highlight his well-known views about originalism, textualism, the importance of bright-line rules for judges to apply, and the proper role of the courts within the system of government established by the U.S. Constitution. It then addresses Justice Scalia's jurisprudence on fourteen separate areas of law, which are arranged in alphabetical order from "administrative law" to "takings," and were specifically selected as key areas of law where Justice Scalia's absence from the Court could result in a change in its jurisprudence. The report concludes with an Appendix that lists the Supreme Court cases from the October 2010 term through the October 2015 term—the time period since the last vacancy on the Court—in which Justice Scalia was part of a bare five-member majority, indicating the legal issues where Justice Scalia's absence from the Court could result in a shift in the Court's jurisprudence. A separate report, in preparation, is to address the opinions of Merrick Garland, currently the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the President's nominee to fill the seat vacated by Justice Scalia. The two reports, taken together, may assist Members of Congress and their staff in assessing the impact that replacement of Justice Scalia might have upon the High Court's rulings. Other CRS reports address the procedural issues that the vacating of Justice Scalia's seat poses for the Court, as well as the processes for nominating and confirming Supreme Court Justices. See CRS Report R44400, The Death of Justice Scalia: Procedural Issues Arising on an Eight-Member Supreme Court , by [author name scrubbed]; CRS Report R44235, Supreme Court Appointment Process: President's Selection of a Nominee , by [author name scrubbed]; CRS Report R44236, Supreme Court Appointment Process: Consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee , by [author name scrubbed]; and CRS Report R44234, Supreme Court Appointment Process: Senate Debate and Confirmation Vote , by [author name scrubbed]. Nearly thirty years ago, at the swearing-in ceremony of Justice Scalia, President Ronald Reagan quoted Justice Felix Frankfurter, the famed defender of judicial restraint on the Court during the mid-20 th century, stating that "The highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law." Comparing then-Judge Scalia to Justice Frankfurter, President Reagan noted that the former federal judge's nomination to the Supreme Court was due in part to what the President perceived as his commitment to the principles of judicial restraint and deference to democratic institutions of government. While an open debate exists as to whether Justice Scalia's opinions on the High Court were truly divorced from his "personal pulls" and "private views," Justice Scalia's jurisprudence was deeply influenced by his concerns about the proper role of the judiciary in a democratic society. In some of his most famous dissents on the Court, Justice Scalia voiced pronounced criticisms about what he viewed as the majority's misapprehensions about the role of the federal judiciary. For example, in the 2014 term, in dissenting from the majority's holding that the due process and equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment require states to license marriages between two persons of the same sex, Justice Scalia, in a sharply worded opinion, described the majority approach as "a naked judicial claim to legislative ... power," amounting to an undemocratic "system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers...." Put another way, Justice Scalia's jurisprudence was driven in part out of skepticism regarding the role of the Supreme Court and the "danger" that an unelected judge "will mistake [his] own predilections for the law," undermining the American democratic system. To prevent the federal judiciary from overstepping its constitutionally prescribed role, Justice Scalia's judicial philosophy, particularly on questions of constitutional law, was undergirded by two related principles. First, Justice Scalia was a strong proponent of originalism, a mode of constitutional interpretation which posits that the Constitution's meaning should be derived from how its text was understood at the time of adoption. Advocating for originalism in the wake of the constitutional revolution of the Warren and Burger Courts, Justice Scalia complained that the Supreme Court had too often based its constitutional rulings not on the original meaning of the Constitution, but on broad, amorphous principles such as discerning what was a "fundamental value," tempting judges to imbue the Constitution with their own "political values." For Justice Scalia, originalism, by establishing "a historical criterion that is conceptually ... separate from the preferences of the judge himself," constrained the unelected judiciary. Justice Scalia's originalism was perhaps most famously displayed in the Court's 2008 decision striking down the District of Columbia's ban on handguns, in part, because the Court viewed the Second Amendment as originally understood to protect an individual right to possess firearms unconnected with service in a militia. Second, Justice Scalia argued for the creation of concrete and discrete rules, rather than broad principles or balancing tests, in order to constrain judicial discretion in resolving legal issues. As Justice Scalia noted: "When ... I adopt a general rule ... I not only constrain lower courts, I constrain myself as well. If the next case should have such different facts that my political or policy preferences regarding the outcome are quite the opposite, I will be unable to indulge those preferences; I have committed myself to the governing principle." In this vein, Justice Scalia wrote several opinions establishing bright-line rules in areas of constitutional law formerly bereft of guidance and dissented in certain cases that relied on multipart tests or balancing approaches. Nonetheless, while Justice Scalia argued for a confined role for the federal judiciary, the late-Justice did not argue for the wholesale abdication of the judicial role in the American constitutional scheme. Instead, where original understanding of the Constitution counseled for the exercise of judicial power, Justice Scalia defended the right of the judicial branch to serve as a check on democratic institutions. Indeed, in recent years, he criticized several opinions of the Roberts Court, where the Court, in Justice Scalia's view, "shirk[ed] its job" by refusing to address the constitutional questions raised by the case at hand. Moreover, Justice Scalia's adherence to originalism occasionally placed his views at odds with prior case law of the Court, particularly where the legal precedents, in Justice Scalia's view, departed from the original meaning of the Constitution. As a result, for Justice Scalia, the principle of stare decisis —that is, the doctrine that a "court must follow earlier judicial decisions when the same points arise again" in subsequent cases —was not a central precept in his constitutional philosophy. As such, while Justice Scalia was an advocate of judicial restraint, he did not advocate for an inactive judiciary. Justice Scalia was widely recognized as the most prominent practitioner and proponent of a text- and rules-based approach to statutory interpretation on the Supreme Court at the time of his death. He was widely associated, through his Court opinions and other writings, with textualism, an interpretative method that would construe statutes based on their text, context, and structure, rather than through extrinsic evidence of the intent or purpose of the Congress that enacted the statute. He also sought to articulate "canons"—or generally applicable rules—of statutory interpretation and, in deciding cases, advocated for "clear criteria" for judges to apply. Both aspects of Justice Scalia's jurisprudence on statutory interpretation can be seen as reflecting his beliefs about the proper role of the courts in the constitutional framework, as previously noted. These aspects of his jurisprudence can also be seen as reactions to the generally prevailing approaches to statutory interpretation since the New Deal, approaches that sometimes characterize judges as playing an active role in effecting statutes' purposes in changed circumstances. While questions have been raised about the implications of Justice Scalia's approach to statutory interpretation, as well as the consistency with which he applied this approach in his own opinions while on the Court, Justice Scalia is widely seen to have influenced the manner in which his colleagues on the Court and others approach statutory text, particularly through his focus on the "ordinary meaning" of words and his general skepticism of legislative history materials.