What Justice Scalia's Death Means for U.S. Immigration

On Saturday, news broke that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died at a resort in Texas. As The Washington Post put it, Scalia was “the intellectual cornerstone of the court’s modern conservative wing, whose elegant and acidic opinions inspired a movement of legal thinkers and ignited liberal critics.”

His absence from the SCOTUS legislative bench will no doubt impact the many divisive cases on the court’s docket for the coming months. Among these is a review of Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which allowed some categories of undocumented immigrants to legally stay and work in the country. The high court’s decision on United States v. Texas, in which a lower court barred the implementation of that action, is extremely important—and not just for the millions of undocumented immigrants whose lives remain in limbo pending the decision, via The New York Times: