Antonin Scalia Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Antonin Gregory Scalia was born on March 11, 1936, in Trenton, New Jersey, to an Italian immigrant father, Salvatore Eugene Scalia, and a first-generation Italian American mother, Catherine Panaro Scalia. He grew up in Queens, New York, in a Catholic household that prized argument, books, and the disciplines of work and language. His father became a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College, and the household atmosphere blended old-world piety with a sharp, immigrant belief that advancement came through mastery of words and rules.

Family life also shaped the judge people later saw: convivial, combative, and intensely loyal. Scalia and his wife, Maureen McCarthy, would later raise nine children, and he often spoke as though the family were a training ground for civic habits - patience, authority, compromise, and the acceptance that not every dispute can be refined into perfect consensus. That domestic confidence fed his comfort with public conflict: he did not treat disagreement as a crisis, but as an ordinary condition of serious life.

Education and Formative Influences

Scalia attended Xavier High School in Manhattan, a Jesuit institution that drilled rhetoric, logic, and moral reasoning, then earned his A.B. from Georgetown University in 1957 and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1960, graduating magna cum laude and serving as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. The Jesuit tradition of close textual study and disciplined debate dovetailed with Harvard's mid-century legal culture, where doctrinal rigor competed with emerging legal realism; Scalia took from this environment a durable suspicion of free-form judicial creativity and a lawyerly respect for craft, procedure, and the stabilizing force of written sources.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

After private practice at Jones, Day in Cleveland, Scalia taught at the University of Virginia School of Law and entered government service in the Nixon and Ford years, culminating as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (1974-1977). He became a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in 1982 and, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan elevated him to the US Supreme Court, where he served until his death on February 13, 2016, in Texas. His tenure was marked by influential opinions in administrative law, criminal procedure, and constitutional structure - from his lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988) to majority and plurality opinions in cases such as Employment Division v. Smith (1990), District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), and Crawford v. Washington (2004). Alongside opinions and dissents, his public debates and the co-authored book Reading Law (2012, with Bryan A. Garner) consolidated his reputation as the most energetic popularizer of textualism and originalism in modern American judging.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Scalia's inner life as a jurist was animated by a particular moral psychology: the conviction that legitimacy arises from constraint, not from the sophistication of the decision-maker. He distrusted the tendency of constitutional adjudication to become a proxy legislature and mocked the idea of judicial "moderation" as a mask for preference: "What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean?" The line captures both his combative wit and his fear that interpretive flexibility lets judges smuggle values into law without democratic accountability. In public lectures he framed this as humility, but it was also a kind of protective severity - a belief that, left unchecked, elite institutions naturally drift toward governance by taste.

That severity did not translate into a simplistic politics. Scalia insisted that constitutional meaning can produce outcomes a judge dislikes: "A law can be both economic folly and constitutional". The statement reveals a temperament willing to endure public disapproval for the sake of institutional boundaries. His opinions often defended bright-line rules, not because life is simple, but because adjudication becomes arbitrary when standards float. Even in criminal procedure, where he sometimes voted to suppress evidence, the motivation was structural rather than sentimental: "There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all". Stylistically, he wrote with punch, sarcasm, and a vernacular confidence that made dissents memorable and, at times, polarizing; but the enduring throughline was an insistence that judges are custodians of a text and a tradition, not authors of national policy.

Legacy and Influence

Scalia died in office in 2016, leaving a vacancy that became a political earthquake and a symbol of how central the Court had become to American life. His legacy is double-edged: he sharpened the nation's constitutional arguments, forcing lawyers and judges to treat history, text, and structure as tools rather than ornaments, and he helped make originalism and textualism dominant methods in conservative legal circles and increasingly influential across the judiciary. At the same time, his most caustic dissents deepened cultural divides about the Court's role, making his name shorthand for a jurisprudence of constraint that critics saw as selective and admirers saw as principled. Whatever the verdict, his impact is unmistakable: he changed how judicial opinions are written, how statutes are read, and how Americans argue about who is entitled to decide the meaning of the Constitution.