Antonin Scalia

His father taught Romance languages at Brooklyn College and belonged to the New Criticism, the school that held that a text means what it says and that the author's intentions and the world outside are beside the point. The son took the method into law. Scalia was an only child, born in Trenton to a Sicilian immigrant and a Trenton-born schoolteacher, raised in Elmhurst, Queens, and sent on scholarship to a Jesuit military high school in Manhattan, where he finished first in his class with decorations in Latin, Greek and debate. A classmate remembered him as an archconservative Catholic at 17 who could have sat in the Curia. He was valedictorian at Georgetown and then notes editor of the Harvard Law Review. He said later that he was never cool.

Six years at Jones Day in Cleveland, four teaching at Virginia, then Washington: general counsel of the telecommunications policy office under Nixon, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Ford, defending executive privilege to a Congress still furious about Watergate. He argued one case before the Supreme Court and won it. At Chicago he became the first faculty adviser to the university's Federalist Society chapter in 1981, and Reagan put him on the D.C. Circuit the next year. In 1986 the White House chose him over Robert Bork partly because he was nine years younger and had written less that could be quoted against him, and the Senate confirmed him 98 to 0. He sat for 29 years, wrote Heller and Crawford, and dissented at length and in public from most of the rest.

He was not, by his own count, winning. In 2009, after almost a quarter century on the Court, he described his victories as damn few, and a scholar surveying the record found he had not converted even his conservative colleagues. The method also bent under pressure. He joined the per curiam in Bush v. Gore, an equal-protection holding of the kind he spent his career attacking, and told an interviewer to get over it. Richard Posner called the Heller opinion faux originalism and a historicizing glaze on personal values. He recused himself from a Pledge of Allegiance case after speaking about it at a Knights of Columbus dinner, and refused to recuse from a case about Dick Cheney after hunting with Cheney and flying out on Air Force Two, a refusal he later called his most heroic opinion.

He died in his sleep in a room at a West Texas ranch, where he had gone quail hunting as a guest, and a county judge who never saw the body pronounced natural causes by telephone and ordered no autopsy. The family declined one too. Conspiracy theories followed, and a presidential candidate repeated them on radio. The seat sat empty for 14 months while the Senate refused to consider Merrick Garland, until Neil Gorsuch took it in April 2017. George Mason University renamed its law school for him three months after his death, after an anonymous 20-million-dollar pledge and 10 million from the Koch foundation, conditional on the name. Ronald Dworkin had already conceded the argument: we are all originalists now.

Antonin Scalia's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Morrison v. Olson, dissenting case
  A lone dissent against the independent counsel statute, later much cited 1988
• A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law book
  The essay and replies that set out his case for textualism 1997
• Crawford v. Washington case
  Rebuilt the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses 2004
• Blakely v. Washington case
  Struck down sentencing rules that let judges find facts no jury had 2004
• District of Columbia v. Heller case
  Found an individual right to keep a handgun, reading militia as the body of all citizens 2008
• Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts book
  With Bryan A. Garner. Cited in more than 1,000 cases within seven years. 2012

• 1953 aged ~17 Graduates first in his class from Xavier High School in Manhattan A 97.5 average, with decorations in Latin, Greek and debate.
• September 10, 1960 aged 24 Marries Maureen McCarthy They met on a blind date while he was at Harvard Law School and had nine children.
• August 22, 1974 aged 38 Confirmed to head the Office of Legal Counsel under Gerald Ford He spent the next two years defending executive privilege to a post-Watergate Congress.
• 1981 aged ~45 Becomes the first faculty adviser to Chicago's Federalist Society chapter
• August 5, 1982 aged 46 Confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit He had turned down a Seventh Circuit seat earlier that year, waiting for this one.
• September 17, 1986 aged 50 Confirmed to the Supreme Court by a vote of 98 to 0 Joe Biden, on the committee, later said he regretted not opposing him because he was so effective.
• 2004 aged ~68 Refuses to step aside in the Cheney case after hunting with the vice president He called the in-chambers opinion refusing recusal his most heroic.
• June 26, 2015 aged 79 Dissents in Obergefell v. Hodges He wrote that the majority opinion lacked even a thin veneer of law.
• February 13, 2016 aged 79 Found dead at a ranch in West Texas A county judge pronounced natural causes by telephone without seeing the body. No autopsy was ordered.

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. friend and opposite
• Elena Kagan b. 1960
  Supreme Court Justice and former Harvard Law dean known for her sharp legal mind and writing. taught her to hunt
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. appointed by
• Clarence Thomas b. 1948
  Long-serving justice whose originalist opinions have strongly influenced modern conservative jurisprudence. closest ally on the Court
• Dick Cheney 1941–2025
  Vice president who expanded the office's power and directed post-9/11 war policy. refused to recuse in his case
• William Rehnquist 1924–2005
  Chief justice who led the Court’s conservative shift toward federalism and limits on congressional power. confirmed as chief the same day