justicebio.htm

Antonin Scalia

1986-

ANTONIN SCALIA was born March 11, 1936, in Trenton, New Jersey, the only child of S. Eugene Scalia and Catherine Scalia. His father, who was born in Sicily and emigrated to the United States as a young man, was a professor of Romance languages. His mother, born to immigrant Italian parents, was a schoolteacher. As the first American of Italian heritage appointed to the Supreme Court, Scalia's ascent to the pinnacle of his profession was proclaimed by many as an example of the American dream.

When Scalia--"Nino" to his friends--was five years old, his father became a professor at Brooklyn College, and the family moved to Elmhurst, a section of Queens, New York. Growing up in New York was stimulating and challenging, particularly when Scalia carried the French horn he played in band to and from school on the subway during rush hour. He was a good student, first in public school in Queens and later at St. Francis Xavier, a military prep school in Manhattan, where he graduated first in his class. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in history in 1957 from Georgetown University and was the class valedictorian. At Harvard Law School, where he received his LL.B. magna cum laude, Scalia served as note editor of the Harvard Law Review. Following graduation, he spent a year traveling in Europe, including Eastern Europe, as a Sheldon Fellow of Harvard.

While at Harvard, Scalia met and became engaged to Maureen McCarthy, an English major at Radcliffe College and the daughter of a Massachusetts physician. The couple married in September 1960 and have nine children. The Scalias have enjoyed a strong and mutually supportive relationship, enriched by their deep faith in Catholicism. She has done volunteer work wherever they lived, including working with hospitalized children, helping retarded young adults, and teaching in the Sunday school at their parish church. He has maintained his interest in travel and music (he prefers classical music, especially opera, and sings tenor), and he plays an aggressive game of tennis.

Scalia began his legal career in 1961 as an associate at the law firm of Jones, Day, Cockley, and Reavis in Cleveland, Ohio. Colleagues at the firm remember him as a "brash, instantly likable" fellow who impressed them with his legal abilities and warm, gregarious personality, often engaging other lawyers in spirited debates over legal issues. Scalia worked in a number of different areas, including real estate, corporate financing, labor, and antitrust. In 1967 he decided to go into teaching and became a law professor at the University of Virginia.

Four years later, Scalia took a leave from Virginia to begin a distinguished career in government service. He served first as general counsel, Office of Telecommunications Policy, in the administration of President Richard Nixon and played a leading role in negotiating a compromise among industry groups to set the framework for the growth of cable television. In 1972, and for the next two years, he served as chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent agency charged with the task of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the administrative process. From 1974 to 1977 he served President Gerald Ford as assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. It was in this position, as legal adviser for the executive branch, that Scalia began to articulate his deep respect for the presidency as an institution--a respect that would later mark his judicial writings.

After he left government, Scalia returned to teaching law, briefly at the Georgetown University Law Center, then at the University of Chicago from 1977 to 1982. While at Chicago, he took leave to teach at Stanford University. From 1981 to 1982 he served as chairman of the American Bar Association's section on administrative law and was chairman of the Conference of Section Chairs--a recognition by his peers of his leadership abilities.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed Scalia to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He served on this court, considered second in importance only to the Supreme Court, for four years. He was regarded by those who argued before him as a well-prepared judge, who genuinely enjoyed using oral arguments as an opportunity to probe, to challenge, and to engage in dialogue with responsive counsel. Scalia also earned the reputation of being collegial—able and willing to work with the other judges on the court to produce agreement or, if not agreement, a clear statement of the differences for others to tackle. As in his previous positions, his judicial colleagues, whether liberal or conservative, became his friends, and he was admired for his legal intellect, earthy wit, and "mean piano."

On the court of appeals, Scalia began to expound on his longstanding belief that courts and judges have a limited role in the three-branch system of government established by the Framers of the Constitution. He wrote opinions taking a restrictive view of "standing"--that is, holding that people challenging government action had to have suffered a "personal hurt" by the action before they could be heard by a court. He also made clear that when judges hear cases challenging legislation on its face or challenging its application to particular facts, they should not substitute their own view of what is proper for the view of the legislature or the agency charged with implementing or enforcing the legislation. This philosophy does not mean that Scalia thinks judges are powerless; to the contrary, he sees them as the guardians of the allocation of power among the three branches.

In one of the more visible cases in which he was involved, Scalia presided over a three-judge panel that invalidated, on separation of powers grounds, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing statute. The panel held that the statute unlawfully delegated to the comptroller general, an officer removable by Congress, the power to enforce budget ceilings--a function of the executive branch. This decision was appealed to the Supreme Court and, like most of the Scalia opinions reviewed by the Court, it was affirmed.

On June 17, 1986, President Reagan nominated Scalia to the Supreme Court, to fill the seat left vacant by the elevation of William Rehnquist to chief justice. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Scalia said that he considered the most important part of the Constitution to be the system of "checks and balances among the three branches....so that no one of them is able to 'run roughshod' over the liberties of the people." Scalia was confirmed unanimously (98-0) by the Senate September 17.

From the beginning of his tenure on the Court, Scalia has continued to express, often in a lone concurring or dissenting opinion, his conviction that the judicial branch is the protector of the separation of powers crafted by the Founders. One of the more important cases that arose during his early years was Morrison v. Olson (1988), a suit challenging the constitutionality of the independent counsel, an individual selected by the judiciary to investigate senior officials of the executive branch. The Court upheld the legislation creating the post, but Scalia wrote a forceful dissent, arguing that Congress had impermissibly vested at least some of the traditional executive power to prosecute in the hands of someone not fully within the supervision and control of the president--an arrangement that had no support in the Constitution. Scalia asked, "Once we depart from the text of the Constitution, just where short of that do we stop?"

Scalia's "textualist" approach to interpreting the Constitution and statutes is reflected in his skepticism about the utility of legislative history materials, such as committee reports or the remarks of members of Congress on the House or Senate floor, to determine the meaning of a statute. Scalia thinks that the only legitimate interpretive guide is the text of the statute or related provisions of enacted law that shed light on the meaning of the disputed text. In a March 1992 opinion concurring in the Count's more lenient reading of an ambiguous criminal statute, he sternly rejected the majority’s reliance on the statute's legislative history. "The only thing that was authoritatively adopted for sure was the text of the enactment; the rest is necessarily speculative," he wrote.

Scalia's adherence to the text before him makes him unwilling to find constitutional rights that are not plainly set forth in the language of the Constitution or firmly grounded in American tradition. In two notable cases, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) and Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health (1990), he has rejected any constitutional basis for a right to an abortion or a right to refuse life-sustaining treatment. Adhering to his view of the limited role of the judiciary, he has said that such issues are essentially "political" and should be decided by elected legislators, not life-tenured judges. Some applaud Scalia's view; others believe that the Constitution is a "living document" that has more to it than the mere words with which it was written.

While Scalia is often said to be the most consistently conservative justice, his textual approach has sometimes produced alliances with the more liberal members of the Court in defense of rights that he considers explicit in the Constitution or rooted in longstanding tradition. One example is his support for the Court's holding that flag burning is a form of political expression protected under the First Amendment, despite his deep personal contempt for flag burners. Another example is his dissent from the majority of the Court when it upheld the validity of a mandatory drug-testing program for customs employees, explaining that in his view it violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. Likewise, he dissented in Maryland v. Craig (1990), a decision that permitted children testifying in abuse cases to do so by closed-circuit television on the ground that it was inconsistent with the Sixth Amendment, which protects the right of the accused to confront his or her accuser.

From his opinions, it is clear that Scalia believes that the American legal system is best served when the Court articulates clear rules of decision, not when it engages in subjective balancing tests. He appears to be willing to draw lines and would adhere to them even if it sometimes means overruling long-established precedents.

Not surprisingly, Scalia has attracted his share of admirers and critics alike. His opinions, which reflect a strong personal style and obvious passion, often confront a fellow justice's thinking on an issue. Described as "verbal hand grenades," his opinions are also widely considered to be well-written and to make good reading.

Although Scalia's views are not endorsed by a majority of the Court, he is having an effect--as in the Court's more circumspect use of legislative history. Given the force of his personality, the disarming quality of his humor, his strong intellectual and analytical abilities, and his conviction of the correctness of his position, Scalia is a strong presence on the bench.