Antonin Scalia

Biography

Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1936, the only child of a Sicilian-born professor of Romance languages and a schoolteacher, and grew up in Queens. He graduated first in his class from Xavier High School, a Jesuit military school, then from Georgetown University in 1957 and Harvard Law School in 1960. He practised at the law firm Jones Day in Cleveland from 1961 to 1967 before becoming a law professor at the University of Virginia.

In the early 1970s he served in the Nixon administration as general counsel of the Office of Telecommunications Policy and chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and from 1974 to 1977 he headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, defending the Ford administration's claims of executive privilege. He then taught at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an early faculty adviser to the Federalist Society.

Ronald Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1982 and to the Supreme Court in 1986; the Senate confirmed him 98-0, and he became the Court's first Italian-American justice. Over nearly thirty years he championed textualism in reading statutes and originalism in reading the Constitution, wrote the majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller recognising an individual right to bear arms, and dissented alone in Morrison v. Olson. His sharp and often caustic dissents, including in Obergefell v. Hodges, made him one of the best-known conservative voices on the Court.

Scalia died in his sleep at a ranch in West Texas in February 2016. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.