Replies

As a textualist Scalia believed that statutory language should control judicial action, a wonderful principal to uphold in the face of judges who believe that words mean whatever you say they mean rather than trying to understand what they meant to the people who voted to pass the statute into law.

There is a long article on this: Justice Scalia and the Idea of Judicial Restraint

This puts the onus on the legislature, I presume with the idea that if the law is bad, a democratic society can fix the law by electing new legislators (tell me how this is working out for any of us, please).

The common law was developed over hundreds of years, yeah, over millennia. It is "judge made law" in the sense that wise and fair judges over the years have, through argument, hammered out legal principles that had come to be universally accepted as creating a fair justice system. There were inequities and in England, Courts of Equity were created to fix some obvious problems in the common law. It is more than just some judge decided something, however. For it to become a principal a judge had to articulate and explain the principle clearly enough and persuasively enough that other judges including appellate panels accepted it.

The IRS and tax law is an example of legislatively created law.

The US Constitution is a common law document, most of which only makes sense in the context of the British Common Law tradition that had been brought to the US at the time. For instance, the right of free speech sounds absolute in the Constitution, but the common law tradition was that you don't have a right to slander individuals and you don't have a right to scream fire in a crowded theater.

The problem with common law is that it is somewhat open to interpretation. The problem with statutory law is that it is much less open to interpretation. If cattle rustling is illegal under common law, then by extension so is the theft of pigs, goats, horses and other agricultural livestock of economic value. Under statutory law, it isn't unless specifically mentioned. So if you don't know that people might import and raise llama or Oryx, and you leave it out of the statute they are not protected.

And when you try to write down everything and every exception you get US tax law before the Trump reform, which no one can understand.

There was a generation of American "conservatives," of which Scalia was one, who did not distrust central government authority the way many of us have been taught to distrust it by our present central government authority.