Conservative of the Week: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

Age: 79

Claim to Fame: stalwart of constitutionalism on the Supreme Court for 30 years, passed away in his sleep during a hunting trip in Texas, this past Friday.

Why He's the Conservative of the Week: a strict constitutionalist, a legal genius, a man who wasn't afraid to speak his mind even when he wasn't in the majority of decisions and best of all, a Supreme Court justice who pissed off a lot of liberals with his scathing dissents, there was no more principled man than Antonin Scalia.

The first Italian-American Supreme Court justice, Scalia was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, winning confirmation by a 98-0 vote. Immediately, the Jersey-born and New York-bred Scalia would prove to be an aggressive questioner from the bench who relished pointing out what he saw as the logical fallacies of arguments made by attorneys. Known for his wit, brashness and sarcasm, Scalia readily advocated an “originalist” constitutional interpretation that hewed to the words of the document and the meaning they had at the time of adoption. He disdained the concept of a “living Constitution” whose meaning could change as society evolved and different justices took the bench.

Scalia called the 2015 decision that legalized gay marriage a “threat to American democracy,” said a 1992 abortion-rights opinion “cannot be taken seriously,” and predicted a 2008 ruling favoring Guantanamo Bay inmates “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”
In 2002, Scalia blasted a decision that invoked the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment to bar executions of mentally disabled killers. “Seldom has an opinion of this court rested so obviously upon nothing but the personal views of its members,” Scalia said in his dissent. Scalia was a heavy influence on Justice Clarance Thomas and often sparred with Justice Ruth Ginsburg, his polar opposite on the bench.

The leading conservative on the Court, Scalia leaves behind a wife, nine children and a legacy for mainstreaming of conservative ideas about ­jurisprudence—in particular the principles of originalism ­(interpreting the Constitution as the framers intended it rather than as an evolving document) and textualism (that statutes must be ­interpreted based on their words alone).