Antonin Scalia

On March 11, 1936, in Trenton, New Jersey, Antonin Scalia was born into an Italian American family that prized scholarship and Catholic discipline. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1957 and Harvard Law School in 1960, then built a career in private practice, academia, and the Nixon and Ford administrations. Teaching at the University of Chicago and service on the D.C. Circuit made him a leading conservative legal thinker before his Supreme Court nomination.

Scalia joined the Supreme Court in 1986 after nomination by Ronald Reagan and quickly became the Court's sharpest advocate of originalism and textualism. His opinions and dissents shaped debates over administrative law, the Second Amendment, criminal procedure, and religion in public life. By combining forceful prose with a coherent interpretive theory, he changed how constitutional argument was framed inside the judiciary and the academy.

Scalia's methods influenced a generation of judges and lawyers and helped define the conservative legal movement's institutional success. Later rulings on original meaning, statutory interpretation, and the administrative state remained deeply connected to the approach he made famous.