Scalia dies: Fiery, influential justice backed strict reading of Constitution
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, an eloquent conservative who used a sharp intellect, a barbed wit and a zest for verbal combat to op- pose what he saw as the tide of modern liberalism, has died. He was 79.
Justice Scalia was a dominant figure at the court from the day he arrived, and he
could be an intimidating presence for lawyers who had to argue there. He had a profound impact on the law and legal thinking through his Supreme Court opinions and speeches. His sharply worded dissents and caustic attacks on liberal notions were quoted widely, and they had an influence on a generation of young conservatives.
Justic Scalia died while on a hunting trip in the Big Bend area of Texas, according to a statement issued Saturday by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Justice Scalia had retired Friday evening and was found dead Saturday morning after he did not appear for breakfast, said U.S. Marshals Service spokeswoman Donna Sellers. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Angry dissenter
Inside the court, Justice Scalia’s rigid style of conservatism and derisive jabs directed at his colleagues limited his effectiveness. Justice Scalia himself seemed to relish the role of the angry dissenter.
As a justice, he was the leading advocate for interpreting the Constitution by its original words and meaning, and not in line with contemporary thinking. He said he liked a “dead Constitution,” not a “living” one that evolves with the times.
Laws can change when voters call for change, he said, but the Constitution itself should not change through the rulings of judges.
As Justice Scalia saw it, the difficult constitutional questions of recent decades were easy to resolve if viewed through the prism of the late 18th century when the Constitution was written.
“The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state,” Justice Scalia told the American Enterprise Institute in 2012.
If such comments made him sound old, grumpy and out of touch with modern America, Justice Scalia would agree and consider it a compliment. He said his job was to preserve an “enduring” Constitution.
His tone was mournful at times. “Day by day, case by case, (the court) is designing a Constitution for a country that I do not recognize,” he wrote in a 1996 dissent.
He issued thunderous dissents when the court upheld the right to abortion in 1992, and in 2003 when it struck down the sex laws that targeted gays and lesbians. Then, he accused his colleagues of having “largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda … directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”
Same-sex marriage
He predicted the ruling would lead to a national debate over samesex marriage, and he was right. A few months later, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court became the first to rule that gays and lesbians had an equal right to marry.
A decade later, a majority of Americans agreed that gays deserved the right to marry.
During his first two decades on the court, Justice Scalia was known mostly for his dissents.
But after Chief Justice William Rehnquist died in 2005 and Justice Sandra O’Connor retired a few months later, Justice Scalia took on a new prominence as a leader of the court’s conservative wing. John Roberts, the new chief justice who was a generation younger than Justice Scalia, deferred to him and often assigned him to write the court’s opinion in momentous cases.
In what may have been his most important majority opinion, Justice Scalia spoke for the court in 2008 declaring for the first time that the Second Amendment gave Americans a right to own a gun for self-defense. A lifelong hunter, Justice Scalia said the “right to bear arms” had been understood as a fundamental right since the American colonies became independent.
Justice Scalia also played a key role in a series of 5-4 decisions that struck down campaign finance laws and said that all Americans — including corporations and unions — had a free-speech right to spend money on election ads.
Justice Scalia was an old-school traditionalist. He was fiercely determined to fight a rearguard battle against modern trends. A Catholic, he and his wife Maureen had nine children, and he insisted that they go each Sunday to a church with a traditional Latin Mass. On Saturdays, however, Justice Scalia like nothing better than hiding in a duck blind waiting for unwary birds.
He was born in Trenton, N.J., on March 11, 1936, the only child of a Sicilian immigrant who became a professor of Romance language at Brooklyn College and a mother who taught elementary school. He was known as “Nino” at home, and he carried the nickname throughout his life
He enrolled in Jesuitrun Georgetown University in Washington and graduated at the top of his class in 1957. He went on to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1960. In Cambridge, he met and married Maureen McCarthy, a Radcliffe student.
After Ronald Reagan’s election, Justice Scalia’s stock soared. He was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. And in 1986, when Rehnquist was named to succeed Warren Burger as chief justice, Reagan chose Justice Scalia to take Rehnquist’s seat.
The conservative justices often came together in major cases, none better known than the 5-4 ruling that ended the recount of paper ballots in Florida and ensured a presidential victory for George W. Bush in 2000. Most lawyers had expected the Supreme Court court to stay out of the postelection battle in Florida because vote counting is governed by state law and because federal law says that the House of Representatives will decide a disputed presidential election.
Halting recounts
But acting on an emergency appeal from Republicans, five justices, including Justice Scalia, ordered a halt to the county-by-county recount in Florida on the grounds it could do “irreparable harm” to then-Gov. Bush. “The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner Bush … by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election,” Justice Scalia wrote in the Saturday order.
Three days later, on Dec. 12, 2000, the court issued an unsigned opinion ending the recount.
For years afterward, Justice Scalia bristled when questioned about the Bush vs. Gore decision. “Get over it,” he replied.