Scalia's Replacement Won't Be Quite So Originalist

President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, judging from the list of top contenders, will praise Justice Antonin Scalia and say he’s an originalist in the same vein. But will it be true? Or will the nominee be more like Justice Samuel Alito, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who nominally adheres to originalism but doesn’t actually seem to decide many cases after a detailed examination of the origins of the Constitution?

The difference may not matter in how the nominee will vote. But it does matter for the long-term development of constitutional doctrine -- and whether we continue to have justices who would bind us to the dead hand of the past rather than viewing the Constitution as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes did: as a living, breathing organism that must evolve or die.