Background and Context
By 2008, Antonin Scalia had spent over two decades as the Supreme Court's most forceful originalist voice, a justice whose dissents were as famous for their bite as their doctrine. Lesley Stahl's 60 Minutes profile pressed on an apparent contradiction: how could a man so combative in print sustain one of the Court's closest friendships with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, his ideological opposite on nearly every issue that mattered? Scalia's answer, delivered without hedging, reframed the premise — the friendship wasn't a contradiction of his combativeness; it was the proof of what that combativeness was actually aimed at. The moment landed as American public life was already sorting itself into camps where disagreement doubled as character judgment.
Interpretation
The line does two things at once, and the second is easy to miss under the first. The obvious move is a defense against the accusation of cruelty: Scalia insists his sharp opinions target propositions, not the humans who hold them — an implicit rejection of argumentum ad hominem, the fallacy of answering an argument by attacking the arguer instead of the argument's merits. That much is a familiar, almost civics-class point about intellectual honesty.
The sharper move is the second sentence, and it runs in the opposite direction from where a listener expects it to go. "Some very good people have some very bad ideas" doesn't just excuse the person for holding the idea — it severs the inference that normally runs the other way, from bad idea back to bad character. Most ad hominem reasoning survives on precisely that inference: this position is monstrous, therefore its holder is diminished. Scalia refuses the inference in both directions simultaneously. A person's goodness doesn't launder a bad argument (he still calls it bad), and a bad argument doesn't indict the person (he still calls them good). This is a double fallacy-guard: it blocks the genetic fallacy (judging an idea by who holds it) at the same moment it blocks the ad hominem (judging a person by what they argue).
What makes this more than a debate-club nicety is the "day job" clause that follows in the full source text but is usually clipped from circulation (see Provenance): "if you can't separate the two, you gotta get another day job... at least not a judge on a multi-member panel." Scalia isn't offering a general-purpose etiquette rule; he's naming a structural requirement of his actual work. A multi-member court is a standing institution that must keep functioning across decades of disagreement among the same small group of people. If disagreement curdled into personal contempt, the institution — not just the friendship — would seize up. The line is simultaneously a psychological posture, a rule of collegial method, and a description of what the job demands of anyone who wants to do it well.
There's also a quieter claim buried in "very good" and "very bad" — both intensified, both asserted with total confidence. Scalia isn't modeling tepid relativism where nothing is really wrong with anyone's ideas. He's modeling the harder discipline: hold the conviction that an idea is genuinely, seriously mistaken, and hold simultaneously that its holder is genuinely, seriously admirable. The line is demanding precisely because it refuses the easier exits — neither "if they're good, the idea can't be that bad" nor "if the idea's that bad, they can't really be good."
Current Relevance
The distinction the quote insists on has become harder to practice, not easier, in the years since. Networked outrage rewards exactly the inference Scalia refused: an idea's badness treated as dispositive evidence about the person, amplified because moral verdicts travel faster and further than arguments do — a hot take that says "this person is bad" spreads on engagement metrics in a way that "this argument has a flaw in premise two" never will. Algorithmically sorted feeds reward the collapse of idea and identity because contempt is stickier content than critique; outrage has better retention than analysis, and platforms optimize for retention, not accuracy of inference.
"Cancel culture" debates — whatever one thinks of the phrase itself — are largely arguments about whether the ideas/people distinction should hold at all, or whether some ideas are so disqualifying, so revealing of bad faith or malice, that treating them as separable from the person is itself a dodge, a way of letting someone off the hook for what they actually believe. That's a real question, not just noise; Scalia's line doesn't resolve it, it just names one side clearly, and names it from a position — a sitting judge whose job depended on the distinction holding — that not every disputant shares.
Scalia and Ginsburg's friendship, invoked constantly in op-eds, commencement speeches, and "can't we disagree better" columns, has become a kind of secular relic — cited more often as nostalgia for a discipline than as a live, ongoing practice, which is itself evidence of how much rarer the practice has gotten. Where in 2008 the friendship was mildly surprising, a human-interest footnote to a legal profile, by the mid-2020s it reads to many as almost quaint, a relic of a lower-stakes and lower-velocity media environment that no longer exists. The distinction also gets tested differently now than it did then: in 2008 the main threat to it was interpersonal, one person choosing contempt over respect. Today the threat is structural — platforms, incentives, and algorithms that profit from the collapse whether or not any individual person wants it to happen, which makes practicing Scalia's discipline less a matter of personal virtue than of active resistance against systems built to erode it.
Impact and Legacy
The line outlived the interview that produced it. It resurfaced constantly at Scalia's death in February 2016, when Ginsburg herself repeated the anecdote in tributes, in interviews, and later in her book My Own Words (2016), cementing the phrase as the standard shorthand for the two justices' improbable friendship — to the point that most people who can quote it today have never seen the original 60 Minutes segment. It became a recurring reference point in commentary on judicial collegiality specifically (invoked in tributes to other cross-ideological pairs on multi-member courts), in civics curricula on disagreement and pluralism, and in general-audience writing about polarization, where it functions as the go-to proof-of-concept that deep ideological opposition and personal warmth aren't mutually exclusive. The 2015 comic opera Scalia/Ginsburg by Derrick Wang, built around their real dissents and friendship, and the wave of retrospectives following both justices' deaths (Scalia in 2016, Ginsburg in 2020), kept the line circulating well past its original interview context. It is, at this point, more famous decontextualized — clipped, captioned, recirculated — than it ever was as a full answer to Lesley Stahl's question. Its legacy also runs through legal education specifically: it is cited in discussions of judicial temperament and collegiality on multi-member courts, sometimes alongside other cross-ideological pairings (Ginsburg herself later invoked the same principle in describing her working relationship with other conservative colleagues), functioning less as a one-off anecdote than as an articulated norm new judges are pointed toward.
Contrasting Views or Controversies
The distinction has real critics, and they aren't making a weak case. The strongest objection is that the ideas/people split is easiest to maintain when the "idea" under dispute doesn't touch your own standing — when it's abstract for you. For someone whose civil rights, safety, or legal personhood is the idea being argued over (many of the cases Scalia and Ginsburg split hardest on — gay rights, reproductive rights, affirmative action — were exactly this kind), "it's just an idea, not an attack on you" is a distinction that can only be drawn from a position of security the subject of the debate doesn't share; for the person whose standing is the thing being litigated, the "idea" and the assault on their personhood are the same event, not two separable layers.
Critics have also pointed to Scalia's own written record as evidence the ideal wasn't fully honored even by its author — his Lawrence v. Texas (2003) dissent, for one, used language about gay rights advocates and "the homosexual agenda" that many readers experienced as personally dismissive of a class of people, not merely critical of a legal argument, which complicates any reading of Scalia as a clean exemplar of his own principle rather than someone who, like most people, honored it unevenly depending on the stakes.
A further, more structural objection: two sitting justices' collegiality — sustained across shared elite legal training, comparable lifetime job security, overlapping Washington social circles, and near-identical institutional incentives to preserve a functioning Court — may be a less impressive achievement, and a less exportable model, than it looks when held up as a template for disagreement among people without that structural cushion. It is easier to separate an idea from a person you will still be having dinner with regardless of who wins the case. None of this makes the underlying discipline worthless, but it does mean the quote describes an aspiration that is unevenly available depending on one's stakes and security, not a neutral technique anyone can simply adopt by choosing to.
Practical Application
- Individually: before responding to a position you find alarming, try naming the strongest version of it before you argue against it — steelmanning forces the idea/person split the quote describes, rather than assuming it, because it requires taking the argument seriously enough to state well before you're allowed to reject it.
- In relationships and families: treat a disagreement about politics or belief as information about a claim, not a referendum on the other person's worth, especially with people you intend to keep close — the "day job" logic applies to any standing relationship, not just judicial ones; a sibling or parent you'll keep seeing for decades needs the same discipline a multi-member court needs to keep functioning.
- In organizations: build review and feedback norms that explicitly separate critique of a proposal from evaluation of the person who made it — critique the plan, not the planner, phrase feedback about the work rather than the worker, and train reviewers to notice when their language has quietly drifted from one to the other.
- In public discourse and media consumption: resist treating an opponent's worst-stated position as proof of their character; resist, in the other direction, treating an ally's good character as proof their argument is sound — both inferences are the same fallacy running in different directions, and noticing which one you're making in the moment is the actual skill.
- In institutions built for standing disagreement (courts, boards, faculties, editorial staffs): recognize that collegiality is not a soft add-on to the job but often the load-bearing structure that lets the institution keep disagreeing productively for years without breaking — design onboarding, norms, and even physical seating to reinforce it rather than treating it as a personality trait some members happen to have.
- In moments of real anger: use the "day job" test literally — ask whether staying in this relationship, role, or conversation requires you to keep separating the person from the position; if the honest answer is no, that's diagnostic information, not a failure of civility.
Background on the Author
Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1986 until his death, appointed by Ronald Reagan after a career as a law professor at the University of Virginia and University of Chicago, a Justice Department official in the Ford and Reagan administrations, and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He became the Court's most influential advocate for originalism and textualism — the view that constitutional and statutory text should be read according to its original public meaning — and one of its most stylistically combative writers, with dissents famous for their rhetorical force, sometimes to the point of drawing criticism for their sharpness toward colleagues' own reasoning.
What authorizes this particular claim is not abstract temperament but a documented, decades-long record: his friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg began when both served together on the D.C. Circuit in the early 1980s, years before either reached the Supreme Court, and continued through opera trips, shared New Year's Eve dinners between their families, joint public appearances, and, by their own repeated accounts, genuine mutual affection sustained across every major ideological fracture on the Court's docket — abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, campaign finance. He was not describing a hypothetical discipline he recommended to others from a distance; he was describing the one he had actually practiced, under sustained public and professional scrutiny, for over thirty years, with the person whose votes most often ran counter to his own.