Antonin Scalia

Antonin Scalia (born March 11, 1936) has been a US Supreme Court Associate Justice since 1986. He is widely considered the leading conservative voice on the Court.

Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey. His mother, Catherine, was born in the United States; his father, S. Eugenee, in Italy. His father was a Professor of Romance Languages. When Scalia was five years old, his family moved to Queens, New York City, New York. His father was working at Brooklyn College.

He attended high school at Xavier High School, a Catholic military academy in Manhattan. He graduated first in his class and summa cum laude with an A.B. from Georgetown University in 1957. While at Georgetown he also studied at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He went on to study law at Harvard Law School. He graduated from there in 1960, the following year he was a Sheldon Fellow of Harvard University. The fellowship allowed him to travel throughout Europe during 1960-1961.

He married Maureen McCarthy on September 10, 1960. She was an English major at Radcliffe College. Her father was a physician in Massachusetts. They have nine children – Ann Forrest, Eugene, John Francis, Catherine Elisabeth, Mary Clare, Paul David (now a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Arlington), Matthew, Christopher James, and Margaret Jane.

He began his legal career at Jones, Day, Cockley, and Reavis in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked from 1961-1967. He became a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia in 1967. In 1971, he went into government service. He began as the general counsel, for the Office of Telecommunications Policy, under President Richard Nixon. His major accomplishment here was to formulate policy for the growth of cable television. From 1972 to 1974, he was the chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States. He served from 1974 to 1977 in the Ford administration as the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.

He returned to academia in 1977 to the University of Chicago Law School from 1977-1982, and a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University and Stanford University. He was chairman of the American Bar Association's Section of Administrative Law, 1981-1982, and its Conference of Section Chairmen, 1982-1983.

He was appointed Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1982. Then, in 1986 President Reagan nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Scalia was approved by the Senate in a vote of 98-0 and he took his seat on September 26, 1986. He is the first Italian-American Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Issues

Scalia is considered the Court's leading proponent of originalism, and also of insisting on a strict literal interpretation of the text of the Constitution of the United States, and of all other statutory laws which are at issue in a particular case. In the latter regard, his "textualist" approach has been compared with that of the late Justice Hugo Black, although Black tends to be regarded as liberal whereas Scalia is almost always described as conservative.

Beyond his legal philosophy, Scalia is well known for his "prickly" personality, and direct lively questioning during arguments before the court. He is also famous for restricting the video and audio recording of his speeches given in public.

In April 2004, at a Scalia speech in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, U.S. marshal Melanie Rube, acting as security detail, confiscated the audio tape of a reporter covering the event. After some controversy over the incident, Scalia apologized and stated he did not order the marshal to do so. He has since amended his policy so that print reporters are now allowed to record his speeches to "promote accurate reporting".

He used to bar the electronic media from recording his appearances, citing "my First Amendment right not to speak on the radio or television when I do not wish to do so", but he no longer does that either.

External links

• Supreme court official bio (PDF)