(CNN) -- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is known for bold disagreement, conservative arguments, pointed questions and the occasional crude hand gesture, and still, it's been an intense few months for one of the high court's most polarizing figures, with biting insults hurled in his direction. 

Last month, Scalia dissented in the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 health care ruling, writing that the court undermined values of "caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the federal government is one of limited powers." 

Three days earlier, when the high court mostly rejected Arizona's immigration law, Scalia's minority opinion showed he was "more than usually outraged," CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said. In a solo dissent read from the bench, the 76-year-old dressed down the Obama administration and suggested Arizona wouldn't have entered the union if it had known how the ruling would come down: "If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign state." 

While many call Scalia a brilliant legal mind, his dissent on the court's Arizona immigration decision was accused of being too political, "more like a right-wing blogger or Fox News pundit," according to Politico. The Daily Beast called it "his churlish and self-aggrandizing and probably unethical tirade." 

An opinion in Salon called Scalia an "increasingly intolerant and intolerable blowhard: a pompous celebrant of his own virtue and rectitude" -- in short, the headline said, a "ranting old man." Liberal Washington Post opinion writer E.J. Dionne Jr. called for Scalia to resign. 
what is Arizona wanting to do?
securing its territory