Justice John Paul Stevens, who died this week, came to be defined in part by his sharply contrasting antagonist Antonin Scalia, the previous Supreme Court Justice to die (in February 2016). While Stevens and Scalia, both life-long Republicans appointed by Republican Presidents, shared many similarities, they came to reflect entirely different conceptions of what a justice should be. Stevens was lawyerly in his preparation and meticulous in his attention to detail and facts; Scalia was lawyerly in that he was a fierce advocate for the positions he championed, but facts and details were simply inconvenient impediments to be bull-dozed out of his way. Two areas of contention where Scalia prevailed over Stevens — the death penalty and the Second Amendment – will in the fullness of time likely vindicate Stevens’ superiority as a judge guided by truth, scholarship, wisdom, and craft rather than ideology.

In 2008 in Baze v. Rees, Justice Stevens carefully noted that “there remains no reliable statistical evidence that capital punishment in fact deters potential offenders.” Justice Scalia replied by saying that Justice Stevens’ conclusions “are not supported by the available data.” Of course, Stevens was correct and Justice Scalia supported his assertion with a cite to a single article by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule that was not an empirical evaluation of the deterrent effect of the death penalty, but rather a philosophical discussion of what would be appropriate policy if the death penalty did deter. Sunstein soon corrected Justice Scalia’s mis-citation, writing that “the best reading of the accumulated data is that they do not establish a deterrent effect of the death penalty.”

But ideologues are rarely discouraged by evidence that contradicts their beliefs. In 2015 in Glossip v. Gross, recidivist Scalia was at it again, re-citing the original Sunstein and Vermeule article as one of the “statistical studies” that supported the deterrent effect of the death penalty – despite their being strongly criticized in a unanimous 2012 report of the National Research Council. Stevens never allowed himself to stray so recklessly from credible authority; Scalia never allowed his pursuit of a pre-determined outcome to be constrained by credible authority.

Ironically, it was the 2008 judicial battle in Heller v. District of Columbia that showed that while Scalia could defeat Stevens with 5 votes from a rightward-drifting court, it was Stevens who prevailed as an expositor of the Constitution, whether from an originalist or more pragmatic perspective. As “textualist” Scalia blithely ignored the language of the Second Amendment referring to a “well-regulated militia,” Stevens showed how the text, history, and tradition of gun regulation all cut against Scalia’s bizarre view that while the founding fathers would permit bans on weapons of war they would not tolerate restrictions on weapons preferred by criminals. As Justice Stevens thundered in response: “The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons. Absent compelling evidence that is nowhere to be found in the Court’s opinion, I could not possibly conclude that the Framers made such a choice.”

Justice Stevens was a man of unusual grace and wisdom, who continued to grow as a thinker and retain a trenchant mind beyond the time of his resignation from the Court in 2010 at age 90 until his death at age 99. Republican appointees looking for good judicial role models would do well to look past a justice like Scalia who often adopted the “specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people” that the founders warned of in Federalist Number 1 to a justice like Stevens who embodied the attributes of fidelity to truth, craft, justice, and wisdom that the founders would truly have valued.

John J. Donohue III has been one of the leading empirical researchers in the legal academy over the past 25 years. Professor Donohue is an economist as well as a lawyer and is well known for using empirical analysis to determine the impact of law and public policy in a wide range of areas, including civil rights and antidiscrimination law, employment discrimination, crime and criminal justice, and school funding.