“One might have thought this was simple common sense,” writes Robert P. George, speaking of the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s judicial philosophy of “originalism.” George, one of the country’s leading conservative intellectuals, is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School., and was an old friend of Scalia’s.

In a combined tribute to his friend and short primer on “originalism” published on Public Discourse, George defined originalism as “the idea that the Constitution means what it says — i.e., what the people who framed and ratified its provisions meant by the words they used” and that what it says “should guide and govern judges in determining whether a law or policy ought to be upheld as constitutionally valid or declared unconstitutional.”

To do otherwise was to “Lochnerize,” George explains, using legal jargon referring to a 1905 ruling when the Supreme Court over-ruled a state legislature because the majority disagreed with the legislature’s decision. Scalia himself offered that decision as one the other two branches of government should reject, mentioning also Dred Scott v. Sandford and Roe v. Wade.

To “Lochnerize,” Scalia saw, is “to deprive the American people of the right to govern themselves. For judges, on the pretext of enforcing constitutional guarantees, to substitute their own moral and political judgments for the contrary judgments of the elected representatives of the people is an assault upon the very Constitution in whose name they purport to be acting.”

Originalism isn’t enough by itself. Scalia also defended “departmentalism,” the idea that all three branches of the federal government have “equal authority and responsibility” in interpreting the Constitution. He opposed the now dominant view of “judicial supremacy,” that whatever the Supreme Court says, goes. It is an old battle, and Scalia agreed with Abraham Lincoln and disagreed with the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney.

The question arose whether Lincoln as president would consider himself bound by Taney’s pro-slavery ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford (striking down congressional restrictions on slavery in U.S. territories, and holding that blacks — even free blacks— could never be citizens). In the Great Emancipator’s First Inaugural Address, he answered that for the American people to treat the judiciary as supreme in constitutional interpretation would be for them to “have ceased to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Scalia and Lincoln both believed that “the rule of law was not the rule of judges; and a decision of the Supreme Court was the law of the case (binding on the parties) but not necessarily the law of the land (binding on the other branches of government).”

In the personal part of the article, George describes his “dear friend” as a man who did not suffer fools gladly but also a man of “great kindness and generosity,” a devout and open Catholic, and someone with a great gift of friendship.