Many will write better and more personal things about Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court Justice who died today. I did not have him as a professor. I did not clerk for him. I encountered Scalia as a graduate student getting a first taste of constitutional law.

Dr. John Maltese, my professor at the University of Georgia, labored over our class on Rights & Liberties. He was conscientious as he approached the Court and its opinions. Never one to show much of his own preferences, Dr. Maltese forced us to grapple with all the arguments, even the ones we preferred to avoid. There was one justice that compelled our attention whenever he picked up his pen. I had liberal and conservative classmates. Some of us were so traditional we practically wrote with quills, while others would figuratively burn the Constitution, so chafed were they by its perceived shackles. All of us had to wrestle with this man and his ideas. Why? Because Justice Scalia could not be ignored. His prose was as vigorous as his intellect. Even those who thought him a cretin still attempted to refute him.

But, let’s be honest. Most of us read the man, at least at first, because he was funny. My favorite Scalia opinion comes from an Establishment Clause case, Lamb’s Chapel. In it, Scalia’s concurrence manages both to entertain and lampoon his colleagues’ willingness to use or discard precedent (the Lemon test) seemingly at whim.

As to the Court’s invocation of the Lemon test: like some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys…Its most recent burial, only last Term, was, to be sure, not fully six-feet under: our decision in Lee v. Weisman…conspicuously avoided using the supposed “test,” but also declined the invitation to repudiate it. Over the years, however, no fewer than five of the currently sitting Justices have, in their own opinions, personally driven pencils through the creature’s heart (the author of today’s opinion repeatedly), and a sixth has joined an opinion doing so…

The secret of the Lemon test’s survival, I think, is that it is so easy to kill. It is there to scare us (and our audience) when we wish it to do so, but we can command it to return to the tomb at will…When we wish to strike down a practice it forbids, we invoke it…when we wish to uphold a practice it forbids, we ignore it entirely…Sometimes, we take a middle course, calling its three prongs “no more than helpful signposts,”…Such a docile and useful monster is worth keeping around, at least in a somnolent state; one never knows when one might need him.

I grew to love constitutional law sitting at John Maltese’s feet, but Antonin Scalia made me understand its gravity. For him, constitutional law was not an intellectual exercise. It was, instead, an endeavor to balance the audacious American form of government. James Madison wrote, immortally,

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

I sit, in frozen Ohio, a humble professor who will never darken the door of a faculty lounge at Harvard, or don a robe and ascend to the federal bench. Justice Antonin Scalia will be considered among the most influential jurists in our history because he spun Madison’s words into a philosophy of law that will survive well past the shock of today. He knew, better than any of us, that government’s strength and legitimacy is inherently related to its ability to govern. In our system, that means harnessing the public’s opinions and turning them into policy. Those opinions may be messy, undignified, or even politically incorrect, but laws that reflect those opinions deserve an abiding respect because of their source–the sovereigns we meet on the streets every day.

Scalia’s deference, of course, had its limits. As Madison says, the government has to control itself. Scalia knew, though we have mostly forgotten, that governmental control is baked into the design of the Constitution itself. We have three branches of government that both share and separately wield the most fearsome powers known to humanity. Government chooses life and death, and often defines right and wrong. The American system obliges the government to control itself by fragmenting these powers and generating potential conflict in their use.

We probably focus too much on the Bill of Rights. It is sacred parchment, to be sure, but the parchment’s strength and endurance depends on the government’s ability to control itself. The rights are only as good as the government that respects them. This is why the design matters most.

Even those who abhor Justice Scalia, agree with everything I have just written. Of course the government must control itself, they cluck. Naturally, the design matters, they sneer. The real divide is this. What role does the Supreme Court play as part of this design? For Scalia, and his disciples, the Court must also bind itself. Not by precedent. Not by tradition. Not by public opinion. It is the Constitution that binds the Court, but the Constitution can only bind the Court if it can be interpreted outside of ourselves. The Constitution can be understood apart from our own preferences, Scalia thought. Those who wrote and interpreted the Constitution left a clear record of its meaning. That meaning should guide the Court, Scalia believed, as it examines our government, its powers, and our rights. To do otherwise ultimately empowers the Supreme Court, which, we should never forget, is part of the government. An over-reaching Court knocks the delicate system out of balance by encroaching on the people’s ability to govern. A genuflecting Court fails to protect our rights and liberties against a sometimes hostile majority. Hence, the need for both balance and binding.

We can choose to be governed by law, including the Constitution as the Supreme Law of the land, or we can be governed by our predilections. We cannot have both.

His critics, some of whom are gracelessly dancing at the news of his death, portray Scalia as retrograde, a moral troglodyte who largely stood athwart history, yelling “I dissent.” They are wrong. They are wrong because Justice Scalia did not stand in anyone’s way. He wanted change to come through the proper channels and not through our judicial overlords who are, after all, the least accountable aspect of our government. Consider the matter of gay marriage as an example.

Justice Scalia did not oppose Obergefell because of his sexual proclivities. He opposed the Court’s ruling because it declared that the Constitution, as interpreted by the Court, required states to acknowledge same-sex marriage even when those states had passed laws or constitutional amendments saying the opposite. Of course, you may think, that is standing in the way of progress. Well, only if you think the Supreme Court should override laws passed by the sovereign people’s elected officials without relatively clear and constitutional reasoning to do so. The Constitution, Scalia believed, says nothing about same-sex marriage (just as it says nothing about abortion), so states should be able to pass whatever laws they wish (pro or con) on the topic without judicial interference. That does not make Justice Scalia an opponent of progress. It makes him a champion of self-government and the limited authority of the Court. It was not about his own views on sexuality, but the people’s views. The people must be respected if our form of government is to mean anything.

At the same time, Justice Scalia was perfectly happy to use the Court’s power to strike down the people’s laws or the government’s actions when they obviously conflicted with the Constitution. He ruled with the majority that struck down Texas’ law that punished flag-burning. He frequently joined so-called “liberal” members of the Court to protect criminal rights. Scalia’s jurisprudence is not, finally, about judicial restraint, but the appropriate deference to the Constitution as it both empowers and limits the government.

Antonin Scalia, more than anyone else, shouldered this idea–originalism–into the public square. Before he was on the bench, his notions were so quaint the Senate confirmed him 98-0. Many of those who voted for him had no idea of the force they had just unleashed on the nation. Scalia was the legal embodiment of the conservative revolution that swept politics throughout the 1980s. Like Reagan’s belief that government is as much problem as solution, Scalia’s jurisprudence will last.

The life of the mind isn’t so much a life, but a conversation between the living and the dead. We plumb texts for ideas or provocation. The dead speak now and forevermore so long as their thoughts kindle our intellects. Justice Antonin Scalia, having spent a lifetime engaging thinkers of the past, is now one of their number. He has left a career of opinions that future professors and students will have to consider if they wish to be educated and intrigued. Some will even find sustenance there, just as I did years ago. Scalia will be missed, but he cannot be forgotten. Neither his ideas nor his words will allow it.