Antonin Scalia

Antonin Scalia

Antonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist. He served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. His most significant opinions include his lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson, his majority opinion in Crawford v. Washington, and his majority opinions in District of Columbia v. Heller. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.

About Antonin Scalia in brief

Summary Antonin ScaliaAntonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist. He served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court’s conservative wing. He has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor. His most significant opinions include his lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson, his majority opinion in Crawford v. Washington, and his majority opinions in District of Columbia v. Heller. He believed that the Constitution permitted the death penalty and did not guarantee the right to abortion or same-sex marriage. He espoused a conservative jurisprudence and ideology, advocating textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation. He filed separate opinions in many cases, often castigating the Court’s majority using scathing language. His father, Salvatore Eugene Scalia, an Italian immigrant from Sommatino, Sicily, graduated from Rutgers University and was a graduate student at Columbia University and clerk at the time of his son’s birth. His mother, Catherine Louise Scalia, was born in Trenton to Italian immigrant parents and worked as an elementary school teacher. He attended P.

S. 13 Clement C. Moore School in Elmhurst, Queens, and Xavier High School, a Jesuit military school in Manhattan, where he graduated first in the class of 1953 and served as valedictorian. He later stated that he spent much of his time on schoolwork and admitted, \”I was never cool\”. He was the top student in his class. Classmate and future New York State official William Stern remembered Scalia in his high school days: \”This kid was a conservative when he was 17 years old. An archconservative Catholic. He could have been a member of the Curia. He was brilliant, way above everybody else.’ He graduated summa cum laude in 1957 with a Bachelor of Arts in history. He then obtained his law degree from Harvard Law School and spent six years in a Cleveland law firm before becoming a law professor at the University of Virginia. In 1961, he was highly regarded at the law firm and would most likely have made a partner, but he later said he had long intended to teach international law. He graduated magna cumlaude in 1960, becoming a Sheldon laude Fellow of Harvard University. He took his junior year abroad in Switzerland, where he was a champion collegiate debater and a critic of the Philodemic Society of Fribourg, Switzerland. In the early 1970s, he served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, eventually becoming an Assistant Attorney General. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed Scalia as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.