Antonin Scalia

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Antonin Scalia (2013)

Antonin Scalia (* 11. March 1936 in Trenton , New Jersey ; † 13. February 2016 in Marfa , Texas ) was an American lawyer and from 1986 until his death Assistant Judge (Associate Justice) at the Supreme Court of the United States ( Supreme Court of the United States) . He was seen by many as the leading conservative voice in the court and was a strong proponent of the legal theories of originalism, as well as the textualism sometimes referred to as the "Plain Meaning Rule ."

Youth, education and family

Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1936. He was the only child of Salvatore Eugene Scalia and Catherine Panaro Scalia. His father was an Italian immigrant from Sicily and a professor of Romance languages . His mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants and a teacher. When Scalia was five years old, the family moved to Queens , New York City . His father was working at Brooklyn College at the time .

Scalia attended public school in Queens through eighth grade ( middle school ). With a scholarship, he went to Xavier High School , a Catholic- Jesuit school in Manhattan , which he graduated top of the class. In 1957, after a one-year stay at the University of Friborg in Switzerland , he finished his studies at Georgetown University as the best in his year and received a Bachelor of Arts in history with the distinction summa cum laude . He then studied law at the Law School of Harvard University , where he in 1960 with the award magna cum laude graduated. The university granted him a trip through Europe as a Sheldon Fellow in 1960/61 .

On September 10, 1960, Scalia married Maureen McCarthy, an English student at Radcliffe College . They had nine children. His son Eugene Scalia became Secretary of Labor under President Donald Trump in 2019 .

Scalia lived in McLean , Virginia . He died on the night of February 13, 2016 on a ranch near Marfa, Texas.

Scalia's death fell during President Obama's final year in office, which gave him the opportunity to fill a new Supreme Court judge. Ultimately, however, he did not succeed, as the Obama nominee Merrick B. Garland was blocked by the Republican-dominated Senate for over a year until the 2016 presidential election by denying his hearing before the judiciary committee. President Donald Trump, elected in 2016, nominated Neil Gorsuch for Scalia's position , which the Senate confirmed in April 2017.

Career

Antonin Scalia with President Ronald Reagan (1986)

Scalia began his practice as a lawyer with the Jones, Day, Cockley, and Reavis law firm in Cleveland , where he worked from 1961 to 1967. In 1967 he became Professor of Law at the University of Virginia . In 1971 Scalia, a member of the Republican Party , moved to the service of the federal government (then under President Richard Nixon ), where he was primarily concerned with the legal framework as legal advisor to the Office of Telecommunications Policy (since 1978 ' National Telecommunications and Information Administration ') to formulate on the fast growing cable television .

During the presidency of Gerald Ford (1974 to 1977, Ford Cabinet ) he was employed as Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department.

In 1977 he returned to the academic profession and taught at the University of Chicago (until 1982), also as visiting professor at Georgetown University and Stanford University . In 1981/82 he was chairman of the American Bar Association's department for public law.

In 1982 he was appointed a judge on the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia . This court is considered a stepping stone to the Supreme Court . In fact, President Ronald Reagan proposed him as Associate Justice in 1986 ; he should take the place of William Rehnquist taking, in turn, the retired Warren Burger as chief judge (Chief Justice) succeeded. The US Senate approved his appointment with a 98-0 vote. Scalia took his post on September 26, 1986, becoming the first Italian-American judge on the highest federal court. In 2003 Scalia was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

After Rehnquist's death, Scalia was considered a possible successor; President George W. Bush expressed his respect for him several times during the 2004 election campaign. In early September 2005, however, Bush nominated John Roberts as Rehnquist's successor. Scalia has been the senior judge on the Supreme Court since John Paul Stevens' resignation in 2010.

Legal viewpoints

Scalia was considered to be the strongest representative of the interpretation methods of an originalistic legal philosophy and a textual interpretation of the constitution of the United States . In principle, he did not consider it appropriate to "read" new rights into the constitution. The case law of the Supreme Court should not be based on contemporary views or the moral feelings of the judges, but solely on what the text of the constitution and the laws suggest and how these were presumably understood when they were passed. According to Savigny's criteria , this school of law relies exclusively on grammatical and historical interpretation. For the same reason, he considered legal standards and views outside the USA to be irrelevant.

This approach was generally considered to be very conservative. However, in some cases it also produced remarkably liberal results. He surprised especially left-wing critics when, in the case of Texas v. Johnson was among the majority of judges who saw the burning of the American flag as a safeguard for freedom of expression . Most recently in 2004 in the internationally acclaimed Hamdan v. Rumsfeld caused a stir when, in his dissenting opinion, he described the detention of US citizens (including a prisoner held in the Guantanamo prison camp) as illegal combatants without access to normal courts as unlawful: according to the constitution, the government only has the right to do so if the Congress , the habeas corpus rights have canceled due to a rebellion or invasion. In two other cases he was most recently on the side of the majority, who only allowed the death penalty if it was decided by a jury and generally annulled all judgments in which the sentence was increased by a judge on the basis of new findings.

Scalia's approach led to more conservative decisions in numerous other cases, of which only two examples are given here: In 2003, it was in the case of Lawrence v. Texas in the minority when he saw Texas law against homosexuality not in conflict with the constitution. In the case of Roper v. Simmons of 2005, he was also in the minority: that judgment prohibited the execution of minors. Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, wrote that there was insufficient reason for this in the Constitution; Whether the death penalty for minors is viewed as cruel today in the United States or elsewhere does not matter, and whoever wants to ban it has to change the constitution. The Supreme Court cannot create new regulations of its own accord. As an opponent of the “modern” approach of a living constitution , that is, a “living constitution” that should be reinterpreted over and over again in the course of time, he often stood in opposition to his fellow judge Stephen Breyer , who advocates precisely this approach.

Like all advocates of an interpretation based on the wording and the historical meaning of the legal source, Scalia considered it the task of the legislature to fix changed cultural and moral views by changing the law. It is not the role of the judiciary to make this adjustment through a modern interpretation of the unchanged legal text. He justified his negative attitude towards the transfer of the decision on same-sex marriage to the Supreme Court by saying that such a court decision violated the principle of "no social transformation without representation", which is even more fundamental than the principle of "no taxation without representation", which prohibits taxation without the consent of the elected representatives. In this spirit, Scalia criticized in June 2015 the low diversity and representativeness of the Supreme Court, which was only made up of Catholics and Jews who all (except for one female judge) had studied at Harvard or Yale, and demanded that an Evangelical Christian or at least some Protestant should be appointed judge.

Scalia supported the heavily criticized majority decision of the Supreme Court in the Bush v. Gore , who stopped the recounts of the 2000 presidential election.

Scalia has repeatedly been accused of merely pretending to be guided by the wording of the constitution and that in reality he uses any justification as long as his personal idea of ​​law is enforced. Contrary to his self-perception as a representative of judicial self-restraint , constitutional lawyers called him “ the most activist supreme court judge in history ”. At no time has the Supreme Court so frequently disregarded the will of the legislature or the prevailing jurisdiction. As critics attested, Scalia only resorted to documents from the early days of the United States in a few decisions. The legal scholar Andrew Koppelman described Scalia in an obituary as a "tragic figure" who believed in his originalistic self-delusions and did not recognize that he was ultimately biased and arbitrary.


Personality and dealing with media

Scalia was known for his direct and sharp questions in negotiations. In his explanations and dissenting opinions he often formulated sarcastic attacks on the other judges and tried to prove contradictions in their reasons. According to Gary Peller, law professor at Georgetown University, he was rude to the point of open humiliation when negotiating with lawyers. This and his legal philosophical views made him a controversial person. Despite often contradicting constitutional and socio-political views, Scalia was close friends with his colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg , who was considered to be liberal , which found expression in visits to the opera, New Year's Eve celebrations and trips.

He was one of the most famous judges in the USA. This contributed to the fact that he traveled a lot and loved to travel and accepted invitations to speeches and panel discussions, took part in moot courts and gave lectures. Only after his death did it become a problem that these invitations came not only from universities and legal specialist events, but also from private and commercial clients. In addition to the 258 publicly subsidized trips between 2004 and 2014, he took part in 23 appointments in 2014 alone at the expense of private clients. Those meetings also involved people and interest groups who were actively involved in proceedings before the Supreme Court at the time. Before the decision in the Citizens United case, he took part in a conference in Palm Springs, which was supported financially by the Koch brothers .

Scalia was very careful to protect his own privacy and has long been known for resisting video and audio recordings of his performances; He also backed this with the constitution, namely his "right under the First Amendment not to speak on the radio if I do not wish." He also spoke out several times against having the proceedings of the Supreme Court broadcast on television; he feared that this could give a wrong picture of the work of the court.

In April 2004, a security officer at a public speech in confiscated Hattiesburg , Mississippi the recording of a speech Scalia by a reporter, which led to a public controversy. Scalia later apologized to the reporter and has since allowed print journalists to record statements in order to reproduce them correctly.

Awards and honors

In May 2016, the named George Mason University its School of Law in Antonin Scalia Law School to.

The Italy – USA Foundation awarded Scalia their America Award posthumously. The award ceremony took place in front of the Italian Parliament.

In November 2018, US President Donald Trump announced that he would posthumously award Antonin Scalia the Presidential Medal of Freedom .

Publications

literature

Web links

Commons : Antonin Scalia  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Antonin Scalia  - Quotes
Wikiquote: Antonin Scalia  - Quotes
Wikisource: Antonin Scalia  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eugene Scalia Sworn In as 28th Labor Secretary. Accessed December 24, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Martin Pengelly, Ben Jacobs: Supreme court justice Antonin Scalia dies at 79. The Guardian, February 13, 2013, accessed February 14, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Republicans reject Obama's proposal to succeed Scalia. Die Zeit, February 24, 2016, accessed on November 11, 2018 .
  4. ^ Adam Liptak: Scalia Offered Some Suggestions on a Successor. New York Times, February 16, 2016.
  5. ↑ Laurence H. Tribe: The Unbearable Wrongness of Bush v. Gore , George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 03-33; Harvard Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 72, August 11, 2003
  6. ↑ Vincent Bugliosi: None Dare Call It Treason . The Nation, January 18, 2001
  7. ^ Thomas Keck: The Most Activist Supreme Court in History: The Road to Modern Judicial Conservatism . University Of Chicago Press 2004, ISBN 978-0-226-42885-7
  8. ↑ Mark Graber: Justice Scalia's Orwellian Jurisprudence . Balkinization, February 16, 2016
  9. ^ Andrew Koppelman: The tragedy of Antonin Scalia: How one of the most brilliant jurists of his generation went so wrong , Salon, February 16, 2016
  10. ↑ Glenn Greenwald: Georgetown Law Professors Say Students Are “Traumatized” by Criticisms of Scalia, Demand “Remedies” . The Intercept, February 23, 2016
  11. ↑ Irin Carmon: What made the friendship between Scalia and Ginsburg work. The Washington Post, February 13, 2016, accessed October 3, 2019 .
  12. ^ New York Times: Scalia Took Dozens of Trips Funded by Private Sponsors , February 26, 2016
  13. ↑ Susan Svrluga: It's official: George Mason's law school is named in honor of Antonin Scalia . In: The Washington Post . May 17, 2016. Retrieved November 10, 2018.
  14. ^ Premio America - Edizione 2016. In: Italy-USA Foundation. October 6, 2016, accessed November 10, 2018 (Italian).
  15. ↑ Trump says 7 will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In: CNBC. November 10, 2018, accessed November 10, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Scalia, Antonin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer and associate judge on the Supreme Court
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Trenton , New Jersey , United States
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 2016
Place of death Marfa , Texas , United States