Antonin Scalia

Official portrait

We the People do ordain and establish this US Constitution

Standards of review

Rational basis review Intermediate scrutiny Strict scrutiny

Other legal theories

Substantive due process State action doctrine

Amendments

I - II - III - IV - V - XIV

Defining moments in law

Brown v. Board of Education Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Youngstown Tube and Sheet Co. v. Sawyer Pentagon Papers Schenck v. United States

Interpretation

Originalism Purposive Responsive Textualism

Issues

Civil rights Bill of Rights (United States) Gay rights Commerce rights Free speech v - t - e

“”By law, all Supreme Court dissents must be WITHERING and/or SCATHING, and Scalia's proclamation today was no different. It even includes the phrase "Ask your nearest hippie". I am not joking.

—Drew Magary

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia (1936—2016) was one of six Roman Catholics, the sole Sicilian-American on the United States Supreme Court, and, in the world of constitutional law, "nothing this bad" and "embarrassing." He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1986.

An early supporter of the Federalist Society, Scalia was thus a charter member of the neoconservative movement. He grew up solidly middle class as the son of a language professor and a public school teacher. His death set in motion a chain of events which did permanent damage to the public image of the Supreme Court.

Judicial philosophy

“”Do you think the American people would ever have ratified the Constitution if they had been told, "The meaning of this document shall be whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says it is?"

—Scalia speaking before law students at Santa Clara University

“”Well, I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games.

—Justice Samuel Alito, mocking Scalia for trying to use originalism to solve contemporary problems

Scalia considered himself a textualist and a Constitutional originalist, a rather meaningless term. "Textualism" means he interpreted laws by their plain meaning. For example, if there was a law on sex crimes and it mentions "forcible rope," he would've viewed this obvious typo as referring to tying people up, not nonconsensual sex. His originalist view was that he, and only he, knows exactly what James Madison meant (though Scalia was proven to not know what Antonin Scalia meant). In many instances it is fairly cut-and-dried, such as his support for the constitutionality of the death penalty (even on minors) on the grounds that the Framers would never have thought of it as cruel and unusual. However, given that they all died around 150-200 years before the invention of the Internet, it is unknown exactly how he is able to discern their opinions on matters such as internet security. He was praised for his defense of the Fourth Amendment but he believed that it only protected property and not people from the police, thus, he would usually give unrestricted power to the police and, at times, overturn decades of precedent. He believed that the Fourteenth Amendment only applies to… recounts in Florida, that axes shouldn't be carried in public but rocket launchers might be permissible, and the Eighth Amendment prevented forcing him to read a 2700-page health care bill, but not torture.

Scalia's intense Roman Catholicism was reflected in an apparent belief that the state's authority is derived from a deity rather than the consent of the governed, as stated in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence. (It is also reflected in his 13 children.)

He was a cultural warrior willing to abandon his supposed originalism so long as it served his ideological agenda.

Humor

Oddly enough, Scalia was also the only prominent conservative in U.S. politics of his era with a sense of humor: at the White House Press Club party entertained by Stephen Colbert (who was sweating bullets to power), Scalia was not only the only audience member laughing, but he joined in the fun with some "ethnic sign language" directed back at the podium.

He was even a hunting buddy of fellow Supreme Court Justice and Obama nominee Elena Kagan.

In his dissent in PGA Tour, Inc. v. Casey Martin, Scalia wrote, "It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government's power '[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,' to decide, What Is Golf."

Apparently, Scalia described the Equal Protection Clause argument (which he used in Bush v. Gore to essentially justify handing Dubya the White House on a silver platter) in the following terms: it was, "as we say in Brooklyn, a piece of shit".

Discriminatory views

“”The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger…. The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific “fact,” since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or “guess.”… It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a “myth.”

—Antonin Scalia in his dissenting opinion in Edwards v. Aguillard

• On 10 December 2012 during a presentation to Princeton, Scalia was asked about how he could vote in favor of laws banning gay marriage and responded: "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?” To make up for it, though, district judges continue to give him a taste of karma by citing his slippery slope dissent against United States v. Windsor when striking down state bans.
• On 8 September 2014, two mentally-handicapped black men were released from prison (after spending 30 years on death row) when DNA evidence confirmed that they were not guilty of raping and killing a child. Why is this relevant to Scalia? Well, the case was the main rationale for his steadfast support of the death penalty for two decades.
• His son Paul is a Catholic priest involved in Courage International, a reparative therapy lay ministry.
• Scalia came under fire for suggesting black students would succeed in "slower-track schools" rather than more competitive colleges.

Scalia once called The Voting Rights Act "an act of racial entitlement" and seized on the opportunity to reduce the "entitlement" in the Supreme Court Case Shelby Counter vs Holder.

Death

On February 13, 2016, Scalia died in his sleep on a visit to Texas. This is only the second time that a SCOTUS justice has died in office since 1955. After months of the Republicans denying Obama an appointment in his last months in office, he was replaced by Neil Gorsuch.

Unsurprisingly, right-wing conspiracy theorists immediately claimed that it was a hit by the Luciferian Obama administration, even though Scalia was an overweight 79-year-old chain smoker with heart problems, high blood pressure, and a very stressful job.

Shortly after Scalia's death, George Mason University's law school renamed itself as the Antonin Scalia School of Law (ASSoL). This acronym proved problematic and the school quickly renamed itself again, as the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. This did not stop students from referring to it as "ASSLaw."The late Scalia, whose sense of humor is well-known, would likely have been amused by the incident.

External links

• 60 Minutes interview (27 April 2008) where he says that torture is not cruel and unusual punishment because the suspects haven't been convicted of a crime yet. See also his brilliant invocation of Jack Bauer to justify torture.
• Scalia v. The Evil Activist Judges