L'esperienza di Antonin Scalia nella cultura costituzionale statunitense

The paper aims at providing the cultural framework for a reading of Antonin Scalia’s mission as U.S. federal justice: his office – covered for more than 30 years during which he adopted, improvedand crystallized the judicial doctrine called ‘originalism’ – might help the European observer to study the paradigmatic intricacy of the debates around the basic tenets of the American constitutional foundation and, ultimately, around the endurance of that pact. On the base of different kind of sources (also his non-judicial writings and his academic andadministrative experiences), this study – after a first part in which Scalia’s legal education and the raising of his judicial doctrine is placed within the context of the postmodern theories of law – is mainly devoted to the analysis of the relations between the American constitutional discourse and the concept of history. Through an overview over the intellectual themes of the American public law, particularly those developed according to the dualistic readings of the sciences of government andsciences of history, a conclusion is reached according to which ‘originalist’ can be defined Scalia’s doctrine only for the combination between classical textual argumentation and its projection to a (constitutional) document dating back two centuries before (flavoured with the postmodern rhetoric on legitimacy of the courts and exactness of the method), but finally it is not too different from the same assertiveness with which the dramatic relationship with the historical depth has already beenrecounted by the American constitutional community.