Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the fiery conservative who used a sharp intellect, barbed wit and a zeal for verbal combat to fight against the tide of modern liberalism, has died. He was 79.
Scalia was found dead Saturday morning at a private residence in the Big Bend area of West Texas, after he’d gone to his room the night before and did not appear for breakfast, said Donna Sellers, speaking for the U.S. Marshals Service in Washington. The cause of death was not immediately known. A gray hearse was seen at the entrance to the Cibolo Creek Ranch, near Shafter, on Saturday accompanied by an SUV.
President Barack Obama made clear Saturday night that he would nominate a successor to Scalia, despite calls from Republicans to leave that choice — and the certain political struggle over it — to the next president. He promised to do so “in due time” while paying tribute to Scalia as “one of the towering legal figures of our time.”
Scalia was a dominant figure at the court from the day he arrived, and he could be an intimidating presence for lawyers who had to argue there. He had a deep effect on the law and legal thinking through his Supreme Court opinions and speeches. His sharply worded dissents and caustic attacks on liberal notions were quoted widely, and they had an influence on a generation of young conservatives.
But inside the court, his rigid style of conservatism and derisive jabs directed at his colleagues limited his effectiveness. Scalia himself seemed to relish the role of the angry dissenter.
As a justice, he was the leading advocate for interpreting the Constitution by its original words and meaning, and not in line with contemporary thinking. He said he liked a “dead Constitution,” not a “living” one that evolves with the times.
Laws can change when voters call for changes, he said, but the Constitution itself should not change through the rulings of judges.
As Scalia saw it, the difficult constitutional questions of recent decades were easy to resolve if viewed through the prism of the late 18th century, when the Constitution was written.
“The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state,” Scalia told the American Enterprise Institute in 2012.
A champion to conservatives, Scalia’s sharp tongue and lust for confrontation made him a villainous figure to many liberals, especially in the Bay Area, where many recoiled at his defense of both anti-sodomy laws and prohibitions against same-sex marriage.
On Saturday, many locals cheered his death on social media. Berkeley Law School professor Melissa Murray, for example, said a friend texted her that Voldemort (the villain in Harry Potter) was dead.
“I think he was a villain in the Bay Area,” she said. “His positions were very much out of step with the liberal orthodoxy you see here.”
While history might not judge him kindly for his opinion on Lawrence v. Texas, the case that threw out a Texas law banning sodomy, Murray said it did provide instruction for conservative lower court judges to limit the scope of what could have been interpreted as a sweeping affirmation of gay rights.
“Whatever you thought of him, you had to admire his intellect,” she said, “the sharpness and clarity of his writing.”
Stanford Law School professor Bernadette Meyler said Scalia’s writing helped push his ideas into the mainstream, especially when he was in the minority. “When he read his dissent, it seemed like he wasn’t speaking to his fellow justices but to a constituency in the nation,” she said.
While Scalia was unpopular in Bay Area, he did feel at home at Santa Clara University, where he was married and where one of his sons went to school.
He spoke at the school last year defending his position that the Constitution doesn’t change with society’s mores.
“For Pete’s sake, it’s a legal document,” he said that night. “It means what it says and it doesn’t mean what it doesn’t say.”
Santa Clara University law professor Pratheepan Gulasekaram, who attended that talk, said Scalia’s death could be a huge setback to conservatives who were expecting favorable 5-4 rulings this session on cases that threaten to limit affirmative action, weaken public employee unions and restrict abortion rights.
“These are massive cases,” he said. “An eight-justice court without Justice Scalia could throw the court into some disarray.”
Gulasekaram didn’t expect Senate Republicans to yield in their refusal to consider an Obama nominee.
“You are not talking about any justice — you are talking about the intellectual leader of the conservative wing,” he said. “When you are talking about that type of influential figure on the court, his replacement by a Democratic president is going to be contentious.”
Sen. Barbara Boxer said Saturday: “I send my deep condolences to Justice Scalia’s family and to his Supreme Court colleagues with whom he had deep friendships.”
In October 2011, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who argued cases before the high court before joining its bench, marked the 25th anniversary of Scalia’s arrival by saying “the place hasn’t been the same since.”
Before Scalia was named to the Supreme Court in 1986, most of its justices shared the view that the Constitution was a progressive document that promised justice and equality for all. They had interpreted it in the 1960s and 1970s as giving women equal rights — including a right to abortion — and forbidding official prayers in public schools, as requiring police to warn criminal suspects of their rights, and for a time, blocking the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment.
Scalia thought none of these decisions was correct. He said those rulings reflected liberal politics more than a faithful reading of the original Constitution. And he voiced his critique year after year, sometimes in angry dissents and sometimes in sarcastic comments directed at his liberal colleagues.
He issued thunderous dissents when the court upheld the right to abortion in 1992, and in 2003 when it struck down the sex laws that targeted gays and lesbians. Then, he accused his colleagues of having “largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda … directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”
He predicted the ruling would trigger a national debate over same-sex marriage, and he was right. A few months later, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court became the first to rule that gays and lesbians had an equal right to marry.
A decade later, a majority of Americans agreed that gays deserved the right to marry.
Scalia was born March 11, 1936, in Trenton, New Jersey, the only child of a Sicilian immigrant who became a professor of Romance language at Brooklyn College and a mother who taught elementary school. He was known as “Nino” at home, and he carried the nickname throughout his life.
Staff writer Matt Artz and Associated Press contributed to this report.
