Antonin Scalia: life, ideas and books

Life

Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1936. He worked at the law firm Jones Day in Cleveland from 1961 to 1967, then taught law at the University of Virginia and later at the University of Chicago. He held posts in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including general counsel of the Office of Telecommunications Policy and head of the Office of Legal Counsel.

President 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 to 0, and he became the first Italian-American justice. He served until his death in February 2016. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2018, and the law school at George Mason University now bears his name.

Ideas

Scalia argued that the Constitution should be read according to its original public meaning, and that statutes should be read according to the words the legislature enacted, an approach called textualism. He held that judges should not substitute their own policy preferences for the text, and that the separation of powers requires clear lines among the branches. He defended a strong executive and, in many cases, the authority of the states.

His positions included support for the death penalty, the view that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion or same-sex marriage and opposition to racial preferences.

Major works

• Morrison v. Olson (1988), a lone dissent against the independent counsel law.
• Printz v. United States (1997), a majority opinion on the Tenth Amendment.
• Crawford v. Washington (2004), on the Sixth Amendment's confrontation right.
• District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right.

Why conservatives read him

Scalia is the intellectual anchor of the originalist and textualist movement in American law, and his opinions are taught as models of argument. Conservatives cite him on judicial restraint, the separation of powers and the Second Amendment, while critics argue that originalism can be applied unevenly, so his work is central to continuing debates about how courts should read the Constitution.