COURT’SCONSERVATIVELINCHPINDIES
Former U. of C. prof led 5-4majority with landmark opinions on guns, gay rights, capital punishment
WASHINGTON — Antonin Scalia, the influential conservative and most provocative member of the Supreme Court, has died, leaving the high court without its conservative majority and setting up an ideological confrontation over his successor in the maelstrom of a presidential election year. Scalia was 79.
Scalia was found dead Saturday morning at a private residence in the Big Bend area of West Texas, after he’d gone to his room the night before and did not appear for breakfast, the U.S. Marshals Service said. The cause of death was not immediately known.
President Barack Obama made clear Saturday night he would nominate a successor to Scalia.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the nomination should fall to the next president. Democratic Sen. Harry Reid countered that it would be “unprecedented in recent history” for the court to have a vacancy for a year.
Scalia, who taught law at the University of Chicago from 1977 to 1982, was part of a 5-4 conservative majority— with one of the five, Anthony Kennedy, sometimes voting with liberals on the court. In a tie vote, the lower court opinion prevails.
Some of Scalia’s notable opinions:
District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008
Scalia was responsible for the majority opinion in a seminal Second Amendment case, writing for the court in a 5-4 ruling that upheld the right to have guns for self-defense in the home.
Turning aside a District of Columbia ban on handguns, Scalia declared that the individual right to bear arms clearly exists and is supported by the “historical narrative.”
Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 2011
In an opinion that name-dropped Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Homer’s Ulysses, Scalia rejected attempts by California to restrict the sale or rental of violent video games to children.
A state, he wrote in the majority decision, has the authority to protect children from harm, “but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”
Roper v. Simmons, 2005
Scalia famously dissented from a 5-4 decision that declared the execution of juvenile criminals to be unconstitutional. He took a similar stance in 1989 when he wrote the opinion, Stanford v. Kentucky, that allowed states to use capital punishment for killers who were 16 or 17 when they committed their crimes.
Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015
Scalia’s dissent in this landmark 5-4 case, which gave same-sex couples the right to marry nationwide, was mocking, angry and sarcastic.
He noted bluntly that the Constitution said nothing about a right to same-sex marriage before going on to lampoon the majority’s opinion— written by Justice Anthony Kennedy — as pretentious, egotistic and, at times, “profoundly incoherent.”
Lawrence v. Texas, 2003
Twelve years before the Obergefell decision, Scalia dissented from a seminal gay rights opinion that struck down a Texas law banning sodomy. The 6-3 opinion in Lawrence v. Texas reversed an earlier ruling from the court that had prohibited gay sex acts.
Scalia accused his colleagues of having “taken sides in the culture war” and having largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” He said the opinion could open the door to same-sex marriage.
It would be, he warned, “the end of all morals legislation.”