As the nation pays its respects to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Friday, friends and admirers say they will remember his combination of gregarious charm and matchless intellect that conservatives revered and many liberals couldn’t help but respect.

Whether he was writing for the majority or authoring a biting dissent, Justice Scalia’s fidelity to his conservative “originalist” view of the law and his analytical mind have placed him alongside legal giants such as Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Along the way, the intellectual force of his reasoning commanded appreciation.

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I am sure he’s going to go down as one of the three or four most influential of all Supreme Court justices,” said Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. “I’ve taught constitutional law for a long time. There is no other justice whose opinions are more likely to cause students to change their minds than his, even progressive students. Even though they’re trying to resist it.”

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“He loves life,” Mr. McConnell said. “He hunts, he goes to the opera, he loves good food and good wine, he loves good conversation, he’s a little loud, he’s opinionated, he plays cards. He doesn’t hold back.”