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 “I love him but sometimes I’d like to strangle him," Ginsburg, a
liberal who bonded with Scalia over a love of opera, once said.
Scalia, who died at age 79, was appointed to the high court by
President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and built a reputation as one of the
nation's most brilliant, conservative jurists. He was passionately
opposed to abortion and strongly supported the death penalty.
Although Scalia prevailed in many areas, thanks in part to the
court’s conservative majority during his tenure, he also was known
for his colorful and angry dissents, often read with theatrical
flair in the courtroom.
The court term that ended in June brought him a series of defeats,
most notably on gay marriage and President Barack Obama’s healthcare
law, which left Scalia especially outraged and believing he had had
his worst term ever.
When the court legalized same-sex marriage in June on a 5-4 vote,
Scalia, who was in the minority, took aim at Justice Anthony
Kennedy’s majority opinion and the liberals who joined him, saying
he would “hide my head in a bag” if his own name were associated
with that decision. He said the opinion was “couched in a style that
is as pretentious as its content is egotistic.”
 That same month his dissent on a ruling affirming Obamacare
dismissed the majority opinion as "pure applesauce" and
"jiggery-pokery."
During oral arguments, the voluble Scalia often aimed sarcastic
verbal barbs at lawyers. He once declared to a lawyer, "Ah, come on.
You can't be serious about that."
'GET OVER IT'
He was equally combative off the bench. His stock response when
asked at public events about the controversial Bush v. Gore ruling
in 2000, which effectively handed the presidency to George W. Bush,
was: “Get over it.”
On the law, he took special pride in Sixth Amendment cases he helped
develop that changed sentencing rules and that involved the right of
defendants to be confronted by the witnesses against them.
But perhaps his greatest achievement came in a 2008 case in which he
authored the majority opinion when the court ruled 5-4 that the U.S.
Constitution’s Second Amendment right to bear arms extended to an
individual right to keep guns in the home. It marked a major victory
for the gun rights movement.
Nicknamed "Nino," the former federal appeals court judge and law
professor was proud to be the first Italian-American on the court.
Scalia brought to the court a concept of jurisprudence based on the
belief that judges should keep out of issues better handled by
democratically accountable institutions such as Congress and state
legislatures.
STRICT CONSTITUTIONALIST
His doctrine of “originalism” centered on the belief that the U.S.
Constitution should be understood in the context of the 18th century
era when it was written. A contrary view is that the constitutional
principles evolve to meet the needs of modern society. When
interpreting statutes, Scalia insisted the justices should look at
the actual words and shun congressional reports, floor speeches and
other artifacts of legislative history.
In one of his most passionate stands, Scalia argued the right to an
abortion never appears in the U.S. Constitution, and that the
Supreme Court's historic 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that created a
woman's constitutional right to an abortion was wrongly decided.
In a 1992 dissent, Scalia explained his position on abortion. "The
Constitution says absolutely nothing about it and the long-standing
American traditions of American society have permitted (abortion) to
be legally proscribed."
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In 1996, he vigorously dissented in the court's ruling that the
all-male Virginia Military Institute must admit women or give up its
state funding.
"It is precisely VMI's attachment to such old-fashioned concepts as
manly honor that has made it, and the system it represents, the
target of those who today succeed in abolishing public single-sex
education," Scalia wrote.
A devout Catholic with one son who became a priest, Scalia was never
shy about discussing his religion.
He used a 1996 speech in Mississippi to urge Christians to stand up
for their religious beliefs. "We must pray for the courage to endure
the scorn of the sophisticated world."
He was in the majority when the court ruled in 2014 that privately
held corporations could mount religious objections to a provision of
Obama’s signature healthcare law that required employers to provide
health insurance that included contraception coverage.
POKER AND PIANO
Scalia graduated from Harvard Law School with honors in 1960. Three
years earlier, he had graduated first in his class from Georgetown
University.
He spent eight years in private law practice in Cleveland and then
joined the faculty at the University of Virginia Law School. In the
1970s, he served as general counsel of the White House Office of
Telecommunications Policy under Republican President Richard Nixon.
Scalia was a law professor at the University of Chicago before
Reagan named him to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.,
in 1982 and then four years later appointed him to the highest court
in the land.
Off the bench, Scalia was known to play the piano and sing at
parties. He used to enjoy a regular game of poker with the late
Chief Justice William Rehnquist and others.
A tuxedo-wearing Scalia once explained to reporters at an evening
get-together at the court that he was going to another party,
adding, "Esteemed jurist by day, man-about-town by night."
Scalia, an only child, was born on March 11, 1936, in Trenton, New
Jersey, and grew up in the Queens section of New York City. His
Sicilian-born father was a professor of Romance languages at
Brooklyn College and his mother taught public school.
He and his wife, Maureen, had nine children.
(Reporting and writing by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by
Joan Biskupic; Editing by Bill Trott and Matthew Lewis)
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