Several Locker Room contributors employ great talent in eviscerating faulty arguments. (Look two entries below this one for a good example.)

In a similar vein, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has spent much of his two-decade run on the U.S. Supreme Court picking apart the reasoning of his colleagues’ worst decisions. You can read some of his better work in Scalia Dissents (Regnery, 2004), edited by Kevin A. Ring.

A reader needs very little knowledge of the law (I place myself in this category) to pick out the highlights of Scalia’s “textual” approach to constitutional law.

On racial preferences:

It is plainly true that in our society blacks have suffered discrimination immeasurably greater than any directed at other racial groups. But those who believe that racial preferences can help to “even the score” display, and reinforce, a manner of thinking by race that was the source of the injustice and that will, if it endures within our society, be the source of more injustice still. The relevant proposition is not that it was blacks, or Jews, or Irish who were discriminated against, but that it was individual men and women, “created equal,” who were discriminated against. And the relevant resolve is that that should never happen again.

On judicial activism (in the context of a ruling against an all-male military school):

The virtue of a democratic system with a First Amendment is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly. That system is destroyed if the smug assurances of each age are removed from the democratic process and written into the Constitution. So to counterbalance the Court’s criticism of our ancestors, let me say a word in their praise: they left us free to change. The same cannot be said of this most illiberal Court, which has embarked on a course of inscribing one after another of the current preferences of the society (and in some cases only the counter-majoritarian preferences of the society’s law-trained elite) into our Basic Law.

I noted a handful of other great examples while reading the book, but you get the point.