On other occasions, he defended vigorously the
constitutional protection of free speech, while expressing
personal distaste for some of its consequences. “I do not
like scruffy people who burn the American flag,” he once
commented, “but regrettably, the First Amendment gives
them the right to do that.” When rejecting attempts by
the state of California to restrict the sale of violent video
games to children, he argued that there was no tradition of
protecting children from violent imagery, citing the pecking
out of Cinderella’s stepsisters’ eyes.
Scalia was also distinctive on the Supreme Court as
the first Italian-American to reach that office. He was born
in 1936 as the only child of a Sicilian immigrant, who
became a professor of languages, and a mother who was a
schoolteacher. He graduated top of his class at Georgetown
University and moved to Harvard Law School, where he
edited the prestigious Harvard Law Review.
His legal career included academic posts at the universities
of Virginia and Chicago, as well as a spell honing as general
counsel of the White House Office of Telecommunications
Policy under President Nixon. In 1982, President Reagan
appointed him to the US Court of Appeals in Washington
before, in 1986, promoting him to the Supreme Court bench.
Scalia’s robustly conservative approach and strong Catholic
MASTER SCALIA INNER TEMPLE YEARBOOK 2016–2017
faith endeared him to a strand of US opinion that began to
assert itself over controversial social and moral issues in the
so-called ‘culture wars’ – though he insisted his religious
beliefs played no role in his legal opinions.
In a 1996 speech, Scalia urged Christians to “pray for
the courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world”.
When an interviewer responded to his reference to the devil,
Scalia retorted by saying: “You’re looking at me as though
I’m weird … My God! Are you so out of touch with most of
America, most of which believes in the devil?”
Scalia’s family life also followed a conservative pattern.
He met his wife, Maureen, on a blind date in 1960 while he
was at law school and she was studying English at Radcliffe
College. Of their marriage, he once quipped: “I take care of
the Constitution. She takes care of everything else … That’s
the deal.”
They had nine children, the result, he once said, of
“Vatican roulette … We were both devout Catholics, and
[that] means you have children when God gives them to
you.” One child, Paul, became a priest, while Eugene and
John are lawyers, Christopher is a PR executive, Catherine and
Margaret work for the universities in Virginia, and Ann is in
health care. Matthew is a US army officer and Mary works for
local government in Philadelphia.
When not engaged in the legal world, Scalia enjoyed
poker and smoking pipes. He was also a music lover, once
appearing with one of his most prominent judicial opponents
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a Washington opera extra.
Ginsburg disagreed regularly with him on legal matters, but
described Scalia as “an absolutely charming man” who “can
make even the most sober judge laugh.”
Among many of his critics, though, Scalia’s views were
far from amusing, most recently when, in a hearing on
affirmative action case, he spoke with apparent approval of
an assessment that it benefited minority students to attend
“a less advanced school, a slower-track school where they
do well.”
The angry response such comments attracted was, to
Scalia, inevitable given his challenge to what he saw as a
flawed attempt, sometimes led by judges, to promote a
liberal society. “A man who has made no enemies”, he once
claimed, “is probably not a very good man.”
Antonin Scalia, US Supreme Court Justice,
was born on 11 March 1936. He died in his sleep
on 13 February 2016, aged 79.
Courtesy of The Times
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