Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia, the bench's ideological conservative known for his fiery
comments in and out of the courtroom, has died. He was 79. Scalia was "a
brilliant legal mind with a pugnacious style, incisive wit, and colorful
opinions," President Barack Obama said Saturday night. "He will no
doubt be remembered as one of the most consequential judges and thinkers to
serve on the Supreme Court." Scalia was found dead at a Texas ranch on
Saturday morning when he did not appear for breakfast, the U.S. Marshals Service
in Washington told The Associated Press. Father Mike Alcunio Santa Teresa de
Jesus Catholic Church went to the ranch and performed last rites, Diocese of El
Paso spokesperson Elizabeth O'Hara said.
Chief Justice Roberts
said that he and his fellow justices were saddened to learn of his death.
"He was an extraordinary individual and jurist, admired and treasured by
his colleagues. His passing is a great loss to the Court and the country he
loyally served," Roberts said in a statement. "Justice Antonin Scalia
was a man of God, a patriot, and an unwavering defender of the written
Constitution and the Rule of Law. He was the solid rock who turned away so many
attempts to depart from and distort the Constitution," Texas Gov. Greg
Abbott said in a statement.
We mourn his passing,
and we pray that his successor on the Supreme Court will take his place as a
champion for the written Constitution and the Rule of Law, the governor added.
The court's most influential conservative, Scalia was nominated in 1986 under
President Ronald Reagan, who named him as associate justice. A lawyer by trade,
Scalia entered public service in the 1970s as general counsel for President
Richard Nixon and as the assistant attorney general. At the time of his Supreme
Court nomination, Scalia was confirmed unanimously — 98 to zero — after telling
senators he had no plans to reshape the law. "I am not going onto the
court with a list of things I want to do. My only agenda is to be a good
judge," he said.
But he quickly became
one of the court's most outspoken conservatives, serving as a steadfast
opponent of gay rights and affirmative action in hiring and school admissions,
and abortion rights. The landmark case of Roe v. Wade, he said, was wrongly
decided, declaring rights that the founding fathers never intended.
"Abortion, homosexual conduct ... Nobody ever thought that they had been
included in the rights contained in the Bill of Rights," he said once. The
nation's first Italian-American justice, Scalia didn't sugarcoat his often
blunt dissents. Most recently, in December, he came under fire from civil
rights attorneys and black lawmakers after suggesting African-American students
might fare better in a "slower-track school" while hearing a case
about race-based admissions.
But it was his comments
over the years on gay rights that often caused the biggest waves: When the high
court legalized gay marriage nationwide last June, Scalia said in his dissent:
"Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means]
were freedoms?" "And if intimacy is, one would think that Freedom of
Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest
hippie," he wrote. His candor wasn't limited to the four walls of the high
court. During a 2012 visit to Princeton University, a gay freshman asked Scalia
about a comparison he had drawn in the past between banning sodomy and banning
bestiality and murder. "If we cannot have moral feelings against or
objections to homosexuality, can we have it against anything?" Scalia said
in response to the question. Though generally unsympathetic to criminal
suspects, he led the court in expanding the rights of defendants to confront
their accusers in court and limiting a judge's power to use evidence in
sentencing unless it was proved during a trial.
And he wrote the ruling
that said the Second Amendment guarantees an individual's right to own a
firearm, the court's most important gun case ever. The last Supreme Court
justice to die while serving was Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 80, in
September 2005. Rehnquist was the first to die in office since Justice Robert
Jackson in 1954 and the first Chief Justice since Fred Vinson in 1953. Former
President George W. Bush called Scalia a "towering figure and important
judge." "He brought intellect, good judgment, and wit to the bench,
and he will be missed by his colleagues and our country," he said. Scalia
was slated to teach in Paris this summer for the San Diego-based Thomas
Jefferson School of Law. He and his wife, Maureen, have nine children.
