Justice Antonin Scalia
Today’s Justice of the Day is: ANTONIN SCALIA. Justice Scalia was born on this day, March 11, in 1936.
Justice Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey. He grew up in New York City, New York, and attended a military prep school from which he graduated first in his class. Justice Scalia went on to earn a B.A. from Georgetown College (today called Georgetown University) in 1957, and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1960.
Immediately upon graduation, Justice Scalia became a Sheldon Fellow at Harvard University (where he remained until 1961) and began a seven year-long stint in private practice in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1967, he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia Law School, located in the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States; in his time there he was an Associate Professor (from 1967 to 1970) and a Professor of Law (from 1970 to 1974). Concurrent with his work at UVA, Justice Scalia also served as General Counsel to the Executive Office of the President’s Office of Telecommunication Policy (from 1971 to 1972) and Chairman of the United States Administrative Conference (from 1972 to 1974). He became Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice in 1974, where he worked until 1977, the year he was a Visiting Professor at his undergraduate alma mater and began working as Editor of Regulation (a magazine published by the American Enterprise Institute) and a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, two positions he would hold until President Ronald Reagan appointed him Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1982. Justice Scalia also served as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University (from 1980 to 1981). He ultimately remained at the DC Circuit until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Scalia was nominated by President Reagan on June 24, 1986, to a seat vacated by Justice William H. Rehnquist (who had been appointed Chief Justice of the United States). He was confirmed by the United States Senate on September 17, and received his commission on September 25. Justice Scalia took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on September 26, and has served on the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. He is currently an actively serving Member of the SCUS, and is the longest-serving Justice on the bench (as well as most senior Associate Justice) today.
Justice Scalia is one of the current SCUS’s most high-profile members, and is widely recognized as the intellectual anchor of its conservative wing. In spite of his well-deserved reputation for consistent judicial conservatism, it is important to also appreciate that he was not always thought of that way. In fact, when Justice Scalia first joined the SCUS he was known for selecting at least one liberal-leaning Law Clerk each term, and initially proved willing to seriously defy conservative orthodoxy on some key issues; for example, he joined the opinion of the Court authored by Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. (a staunch liberal and perhaps the single most influential Justice of the 20th century, as Justice Scalia himself has acknowledged) in Texas v. Johnson (1989), wherein a 5-to-4 majority upheld flag burning as a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. The ruling was harshly criticized by conservatives and even inspired a (ultimately unsuccessful) push to add a ban on burning the U.S. flag to the Constitution. However, in the last two decades Justice has seemingly retreated into something of ideological silo, as he is said to have cancelled his subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post (publications which he supposedly found too liberal-leaning for his liking) and ceased hiring clerks who disagree with his overall philosophy of originalism-infused textualism. Justice Scalia’s increasing conservatism has been demonstrated in a wide variety of cases covering nearly every aspect of law. Yet, contrary to popular belief, he is not the most conservative Justice on the bench today (most agree that Justice Clarence Thomas holds that title), and he still occasionally diverges from his conservative allies, notably in the recent Navarette v. California (2014) case, where he wrote a dissenting opinion, which Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan joined, arguing that the Fourth Amendment does not permit a single anonymous tip to serve as the basis for a traffic stop and subsequent search by police (at least without some kind of corroboration).