An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Antonin Scalia will go down as one of the greatest justices in U.S. Supreme Court history — and one of the worst. His greatness derived from his carefully articulated philosophy of constitutional interpretation, based on the law as a set of rules that should be applied in accordance with the original meaning of the document. Yet on issues from race to gay rights to the environment, his reactionary conservatism consistently put him on the wrong side of constitutional law’s gradual progressive evolutionary path. To put it bluntly, Scalia’s reasoning was almost always beautiful and elegant, but his results were almost always wrong. Scalia, who died Saturday at 79, could be acerbic at a personal level. His biting humor often had a sarcastic edge, and he alienated Justice Sandra Day O’Connor by dismissing the quality of her analytic reasoning. At the same time, one of my fondest memories is an afternoon spent drinking two bottles of red wine and eating pizza at A.V. Ristorante, a now-defunct Italian spot in Washington, with Scalia and my fellow clerks for Justice David Souter, liberals all. Scalia was relaxed, warm and witty — charm itself, trading ideas and arguments and treating us with complete equality. I remember thinking that if this was the devil, he certainly assumed a most pleasing form.