Antonin Scalia
Antonin Scalia
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. Appointed to the Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth11 March 1936
CityTrenton, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
thinking ideas abortion
If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility.
turntables bottom ifs
A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable.
law people community
Nowhere else in the Constitution does a 'right' attributed to 'the people' refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention 'the people,' the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset... The Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms... The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it 'shall not be infringed.
military war thinking
Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis--that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.
exercise rights people
People look at rights as if they were muscles — the more you exercise them, the better they get.
thinking order law
Justice White's conclusion is perhaps correct, if one assumes that the task of a court of law is to plumb the intent of the particular Congress that enacted a particular provision. That methodology is not mine nor, I think, the one that courts have traditionally followed. It is our task, as I see it, not to enter the minds of the Members of Congress - who need have nothing in mind in order for their votes to be both lawful and effective - but rather to give fair and reasonable meaning to the text of the United States Code, adopted by various Congresses at various times.
burning bedroom sanctity
Certainly one cannot ban cross burning in the sanctity of his bedroom.
gun rights people
It would also be strange to find in the midst of a catalog of the rights of individuals a provision securing to the states the right to maintain a designated "Militia." Dispassionate scholarship suggests quite strongly that the right of the people to keep and bear arms meant just that.
hippie mean thinking
Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.
absurd
This is so absurd that it has, to my knowledge, never been contemplated.
mean scary groups
Scalia said the court had pretty much signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, adding: Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means.
jobs practice times-of-crisis
The court's job is to uphold the Constitution and you don't call that off in times of crisis. Would the framers have allowed this practice?
states dissent ifs
Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".
government rights way
The government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.