Justice Antonin Scalia

When Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and appellate judge Richard Posner were feuding—and come to think of it, I’m not aware they ever made up—Scalia got in what must have been to him the ultimate, if not last, word. That’s when he said to Fox News about Posner, “He’s a court of appeals judge, isn’t he? He doesn’t sit in judgment of my opinions as far as I’m concerned.”

At the heart of the feud was the Second Amendment, as adjudicated in District of Columbia v. Heller, a landmark case that in 2008 overturned the district’s ban on private ownership of handguns. Scalia wrote the decision for the Court’s five-to-four majority. “The inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right,” Scalia wrote, and in the view of the American people the handgun is “the quintessential self-defense weapon.”