The sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia has elicited many tributes about his achievements. It has also sparked extensive reviews of his judicial body of work—and raised some questions about how filling his spot will affect the 2016 presidential election and the future direction of the Supreme Court. Like many others, I shall have more to say about these weighty issues going forward. But for now, I’d like to write about some of my personal interactions with Justice Scalia prior to his appointment to the Court in 1986.

Scalia graduated in the exceptional Harvard Law School class of 1960 along with the late David Currie, for many years my colleague at University of Chicago Law School. Currie helped arrange for Scalia to interview for a potential faculty position at the University of Chicago in early 1977. By that point, the election of Jimmy Carter as President had ended Scalia’s term as head of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, to which Gerald Ford had appointed him in August 1974.

When Scalia appeared for his Chicago job talk, he cut a large figure. The topic of the session was executive privilege vis-à-vis the Congress, an issue on which Scalia had sparred with Congress repeatedly as head of OLC. For Scalia, there was no middle ground on this question. He was a passionate and articulate defender of executive privilege, and noted, correctly in my view, that this was an issue that was not defined by party, but by role. Repeatedly, he stressed that every president of both parties had taken this view, which he thought that the constitutional system of separation of powers required.