Antonin Scalia

• 1. Introduction

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  Antonin Scalia won confirmation to the United States Supreme Court on the 17th of September 1986 by a vote of 98-0. Not one senator voted no. Later, Joe Biden, a committee member who became a president, said he regretted not opposing Scalia "because he was so effective". That remark hints at a puzzle. A nominee the Senate barely questioned went on to spend three decades as the Court's most combative voice. He dissented alone, mocked colleagues in print, and refused to trade his views for votes. This documentary follows that arc. Where did the man come from, and what did he believe the Constitution actually meant? Why did his rulings so often scramble the labels of left and right? And what remained of his ideas once he was no longer on the bench to argue them?

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• 2. Scholar From Queens

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  Antonin Gregory Scalia was born on the 11th of March 1936 in Trenton, New Jersey, and he grew up as an only child. His father, Salvatore Eugenio Scalia, called Eugene, was an Italian immigrant from Sommatino, Sicily. Eugene was a Rutgers graduate who was a graduate student and clerk at Columbia when his son was born. He later became a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College, where he followed the formalist New Criticism school of literary theory. Antonin's mother, Catherine Louise, was born in Trenton to Italian immigrant parents and worked as an elementary school teacher.

  In 1939 the family moved to Elmhurst, Queens, and young Antonin attended P.S. 13 Clement C. Moore School. After eighth grade he won an academic scholarship to Xavier High School, a Jesuit military school in Manhattan. He graduated first in his class in 1953 with a 97.5 average. His decorations came in Latin, Greek and debate, and he sang in the Glee club. Looking back, he admitted, "I was never cool." He was also a Boy Scout and belonged to the Order of the Arrow, the Scouts' national honor society.

  Classmate William Stern, later a New York State official, remembered the teenager vividly. "This kid was a conservative when he was 17 years old," Stern said. "An archconservative Catholic. He could have been a member of the Curia." Stern added that Scalia was the top student in the class, brilliant and "way above everybody else."

  Georgetown University, which Scalia entered in 1953, was the next stop, and he majored in history. He became a champion collegiate debater in the Philodemic Society and a critically praised actor. He spent his junior year abroad at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. In 1957 he graduated as class valedictorian with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude.

  Harvard Law School came after that, where Scalia served as a notes editor for the Harvard Law Review. He graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Laws, magna cum laude, near the top of his class. A Sheldon Fellowship then made possible travel across Europe during 1960 and 1961. The Europe trip ended in 1961, and with it his years as a student.

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• 3. Road to the Court

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  The Cleveland law firm Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis, now called Jones Day, employed Scalia from 1961 to 1967. Colleagues thought highly of him, and he would most likely have made partner. He later said he had always meant to teach. In 1967 he left to join the University of Virginia School of Law, moving his family to Charlottesville.

  In 1971, after four years in Charlottesville, Scalia entered public service. President Richard Nixon named him general counsel of the Office of Telecommunications Policy. One of his main assignments there was shaping federal policy for the growth of cable television. From 1972 to 1974 he chaired the Administrative Conference of the United States, a small independent agency that tried to improve how the federal bureaucracy worked. In mid-1974 Nixon nominated him as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. Nixon then resigned, President Gerald Ford continued the nomination, and the Senate confirmed Scalia on the 22nd of August 1974.

  Watergate left the Ford administration in repeated conflict with Congress, and Scalia repeatedly testified before congressional committees. He defended the administration's claims of executive privilege in refusing to hand over documents. Inside the administration he urged a veto of a bill that would greatly widen the Freedom of Information Act. His view prevailed and Ford vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode the veto.

  In early 1976 Scalia argued the only case he ever brought before the Supreme Court, Alfred Dunhill of London, Inc. v. Republic of Cuba. He appeared for the United States government in support of Dunhill, and that position succeeded.

  Ford's defeat by Jimmy Carter sent Scalia first to the American Enterprise Institute for several months. He then returned to academia at the University of Chicago Law School, where he stayed from 1977 to 1982. One year of that period was spent as a visiting professor at Stanford Law School. While in Chicago he was hired by Peter H. Russell, acting for the Canadian government, to write a report for the McDonald Commission. The commission was investigating abuses by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Scalia's report, finished in 1979, examined how the United States limited its secret services. It encouraged the commission to recommend a balance between civil liberties and the essentially unchecked activities of the RCMP. In 1981 he became the first faculty adviser to the University of Chicago chapter of the newly founded Federalist Society.

  Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 raised Scalia's hopes of a major post. He was interviewed for solicitor general, but the job went to Rex E. Lee, to Scalia's great disappointment. In early 1982 he was offered a seat on the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and declined it, hoping for the more influential D.C. Circuit. Reagan offered him that seat later in 1982. The Senate confirmed him on the 5th of August, and he was sworn in on the 17th. On that court Scalia won applause in legal circles for powerful, witty writing, often critical of the Supreme Court precedents he felt bound to follow. According to The New York Times, Reagan administration officials "liked virtually everything they saw."

  In 1986 Chief Justice Warren Burger told the White House he intended to retire. Reagan decided to elevate Associate Justice William Rehnquist to chief justice, which meant naming someone to Rehnquist's old seat. Attorney General Edwin Meese seriously considered only two candidates, Scalia and fellow D.C. Circuit judge Robert Bork. Believing this might be Reagan's last chance to choose a justice, the president and his advisers picked Scalia. Reagan wanted to appoint the first Italian-American justice. Scalia was nine years younger than Bork and likely to serve longer. He also lacked Bork's paper trail, since Bork had written controversial articles about individual rights.

  Judiciary Committee hearings opened in August 1986, right after a divisive fight over Rehnquist. Witnesses and Democratic senators had claimed that, before becoming a judge, Rehnquist had tried to discourage minorities from voting. Members had little appetite for a second battle, and they were reluctant to oppose the first Italian-American nominee. Scalia was not pressed hard on abortion or civil rights. He attended with his wife and children seated behind him. In an exchange with Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, he joked about having beaten the senator at tennis, which he called "a case of my integrity overcoming my judgment." The Senate debated his nomination only briefly. On the same day it confirmed Scalia, it confirmed Rehnquist as chief justice by 65-33. Scalia took his seat on the 26th of September 1986, nine days after the vote.

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• 4. The Originalist Creed

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  In 1998 Scalia spoke out forcefully against the idea of a living constitution, in which judges adapt the meaning of constitutional provisions to changing times. He warned that "the risk of assessing evolving standards is that it is all too easy to believe that evolution has culminated in one's own views." He called himself an originalist, meaning he read the Constitution as it would have been understood when adopted. In 2008 he put it this way: "It's what did the words mean to the people who ratified the Bill of Rights or who ratified the Constitution." By that test, the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 meant what it meant to its ratifiers in 1868.

  Statutes, in Scalia's view, called for a related discipline called textualism, under which the ordinary meaning of the words should govern. He refused to consult legislative history. In 2006, in Zedner v. United States, he joined Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion except for one paragraph that cited legislative history. In a concurrence he wrote that "The use of legislative history is illegitimate and ill advised in the interpretation of any statute." Gregory Maggs wrote in 1995 that by the early 1990s, legislative history appeared in only about forty percent of statutory cases. No case of that era treated it as the essential reason for an outcome. Maggs suggested the other justices had weighed the cost: "No one likes an unnecessary fight, especially not one with as formidable an opponent as Justice Scalia."

  Audiences kept asking how originalism could justify Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that struck down segregated schools under the Fourteenth Amendment. Scalia answered in two ways. First, he pointed to research by Michael McConnell, which he said persuasively showed this was the original understanding of the post-Civil War amendments. Second, he argued that even if other methods sometimes produce better results, so can monarchy and totalitarianism. The real question, he said, is which theory of interpretation fits a democracy, and he insisted that originalism unquestionably does. In a 2009 public conversation, Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that those who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to end school segregation. Scalia called that argument "waving the bloody shirt of Brown." He said he would have joined the first Justice Harlan's solitary dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that Brown overruled.

  Critics saw a cover for something else. They suspected Scalia wanted to turn back pivotal decisions of the 1960s and 1970s reached by the Warren and Burger Courts. Ralph Nader argued in 2008 that originalism sat badly with extending constitutional rights to corporations, which were not commonly understood to hold such rights in the era of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, Scalia concurred and answered with history. He noted that the free speech guarantee carves out no exception for groups such as corporations, and he cited examples of corporate political speech from the founding era. Professor Thomas Colby of George Washington University argued that Scalia's votes in Establishment Clause cases came from conservative politics rather than originalism. Scalia replied that his method had sometimes led him to decisions he deplored, such as upholding the constitutionality of flag burning, which he held the First Amendment protected.

  Scalia peppered his colleagues with "Ninograms", short memos named for his nickname, "Nino", that aimed to persuade them he was right. He did not water down his views to attract a majority. William J. Brennan, Jr., by contrast, would accept less than he wanted to win a partial victory. In 2006 the scholar Ralph Rossum wrote that Scalia had failed to win converts among his conservative colleagues for originalism. Younger judges did admire him. John Roberts and Samuel Alito joined the Court as originalist-minded men who greatly respected Scalia battling for his beliefs. Brett Kavanaugh would later be called "a stalwart originalist" in Scalia's tradition.

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• 5. Power and Its Limits

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  Morrison v. Olson in 1988 gave Scalia his first great solitary dissent. The majority upheld the Independent Counsel law. Scalia's thirty-page draft dissent startled Justice Harry Blackmun with its emotion. Blackmun felt it could be cut to ten pages "if Scalia omitted the screaming." Scalia held that clear lines among the legislative, executive and judicial branches follow directly from the Constitution, and that the law was an unwarranted encroachment by the legislature on the executive. He warned that such issues often arrive "clad, so to speak, in sheep's clothing." This one, he wrote, was different: "this wolf comes as a wolf."

  Mistretta v. United States in 1989 challenged the United States Sentencing Commission, an independent body inside the judicial branch. Its members, some of them federal judges, were removable only for good cause. Eight justices joined Blackmun's majority opinion upholding the Sentencing Guidelines. Scalia dissented. He said that issuing the Guidelines was a lawmaking function Congress could not delegate, and he called the commission "a sort of junior-varsity Congress."

  Congress passed the Line Item Veto Act in 1996, letting a president cancel items from an appropriations bill after it became law. The statute was challenged the following year, and the Supreme Court struck it down under the Presentment Clause. Scalia dissented. He saw no Presentment Clause problem and no separation of powers violation. Authorizing a president to cancel an appropriation, he argued, was no different from letting him spend an appropriation at his discretion, which had long been accepted.

  The detainee cases tested his deference to the executive. In 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, the Court held that federal courts could hear habeas corpus petitions from detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Scalia accused the majority of "springing a trap on the Executive." Also in 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, he dissented alongside Justice John Paul Stevens. Yaser Hamdi was an American citizen detained in the United States as an alleged enemy combatant. The Court held that he had a due process right to contest his detention before a neutral decision maker. Scalia wrote that the authorization for use of military force could not be read to suspend habeas corpus. He said the Court was trying to "Make Everything Come Out Right."

  In March 2006 Scalia gave a talk at the University of Fribourg, where he had studied as a student. Asked about detainee rights, he answered: "Give me a break... I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son." He added that he was not about to give a man captured in a war a full jury trial. He was not referring to any particular person, but the Court was about to hear the challenge of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, said to be a driver for Osama bin Laden. A group of retired military officers supporting Hamdan asked Scalia to step aside, and he declined. The Court ruled 5-3 in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that federal courts had jurisdiction. Scalia dissented, arguing that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 had removed that authority.

  In contests between Washington and the states, Scalia often sided with the states. He wrote the majority opinion in Printz v. United States in 1997, which struck down provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. The law required local chief law enforcement officers to perform certain duties, and the Court held that this violated the Tenth Amendment. In 2005 he concurred in Gonzales v. Raich, which let Congress ban marijuana even where states approved its medical use. He reasoned that the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause permitted it. He wrote that Wickard v. Filburn had "expanded the Commerce Clause beyond all reason", and he called the negative Commerce Clause doctrine "a judicial fraud." His 1989 dissent in Pennsylvania v. Union Gas Co. took a broad view of the Eleventh Amendment and state immunity from suit. Scholar Ralph Rossum suggested that this view actually contradicted the Amendment's language.

  Scalia's 1983 law review article was titled "The Doctrine of Standing as an Essential Element of the Separation of Powers." Paul Barrett of Bloomberg Businessweek summarized its argument after his death. Courts had misappropriated authority from other branches by letting too many people sue corporations and government agencies, especially in environmental cases. Barrett put it in liberal terms: Scalia changed the rules for who could sue. David Rivkin, speaking from the conservative side, said Scalia "did more to clarify and limit the bounds and scope of judicial power than any Supreme Court Justice in history, particularly in the area of standing and class actions."

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• 6. Rights and Rulings

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  Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 drew one of Scalia's plainest statements on abortion. "The States may, if they wish, permit abortion on demand," he wrote, "but the Constitution does not require them to do so." He argued that such questions should be settled by citizens persuading one another and then voting. He repeatedly urged his colleagues to strike down Roe v. Wade. In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services in 1989 he hoped to find five votes, but Justice Sandra Day O'Connor cast the deciding vote to leave Roe standing. Scalia wrote that the Court could now expect "carts full of mail from the public, and the streets full of demonstrators." In Stenberg v. Carhart in 2000, he predicted that the case would one day sit beside Korematsu and Dred Scott in the Court's history. In 2007, after the Court upheld a federal ban in Gonzales v. Carhart, University of Chicago professor Geoffrey R. Stone noted that all five justices in the majority were Catholic. Scalia was so angered that he said he would not speak at Chicago while Stone remained there.

  City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. in 1989 struck down a city program requiring a percentage of contracts to go to minorities. Scalia agreed with the judgment but not with O'Connor's reasoning. In Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, he wrote that "In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American." In Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 he mocked the idea of "cross-racial understanding" as an educational benefit. It would never appear on a transcript, he wrote, as in "Works and Plays Well with Others: B+." On gender, United States v. Virginia in 1996 held that the Virginia Military Institute could not exclude women. Scalia filed a lone, lengthy dissent.

  Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986 had held that the Constitution did not protect homosexual sodomy from criminal prosecution. Romer v. Evans in 1995 effectively gutted it, and Scalia dissented. He later mocked the Court for acting on "the Sexual Preference Clause of the Bill of Rights, presumably." Lawrence v. Texas formally overruled Bowers in 2003, and Scalia dissented again. According to the scholar Mark Tushnet, he argued the state's side so intently at oral argument that the Chief Justice intervened. Critics were harsh. Maureen Dowd called him "Archie Bunker in a high-backed chair" in 2003. In 2009 Congressman Barney Frank called him a "homophobe", and the judge Richard Posner and professor Eric Segall later wrote that his ideal verged on "majoritarian theocracy." His former clerk Ed Whelan called that "a smear and a distraction."

  United States v. Windsor in 2013 struck down a section of the Defense of Marriage Act. Scalia's dissent opened: "This case is about power in several respects." He argued that the Court had no power to decide the case and that the ruling would invite challenges to state laws. He said the Court had "cheated both sides, robbing the winners of an honest victory, and the losers of the peace that comes from a fair defeat." In Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 the Court found a right to same-sex marriage in the Fourteenth Amendment. Scalia argued that the decision robbed the people of "the freedom to govern themselves." He said a ban would not have been considered unconstitutional when that amendment was adopted. He also faulted the writing itself as a descent "to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."

  Thompson v. Oklahoma in 1988 barred the death penalty for offenders aged 15. Scalia, who thought the death penalty constitutional, dissented. The next year he wrote the Court's opinion in Stanford v. Kentucky, allowing it for killers aged 16. When Roper v. Simmons overturned Stanford in 2005, he dissented again. He noted that fewer than half the states allowing the death penalty banned it for underage killers. Counting states with no death penalty, he wrote, was "rather like including old-order Amishmen in a consumer-preference poll on the electric car." He also dissented in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, which barred executing intellectually disabled people. He called Miranda v. Arizona a "milestone of judicial overreaching" and voted to overrule it in Dickerson v. United States in 2000. Only Justice Clarence Thomas joined him.

  Criminal defendants sometimes found Scalia on their side. He wrote against laws letting alleged child abuse victims testify behind screens or on closed-circuit television, citing the Confrontation Clause. In Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts in 2009 he wrote the majority opinion holding that defendants may confront lab technicians in drug cases. In Apprendi v. New Jersey in 2000, he concurred in striking down a statute letting a judge increase a sentence after finding a hate crime. Blakely v. Washington followed in 2004, striking down Washington's sentencing guidelines on similar grounds. The dissenters predicted he would turn on the federal guidelines he had failed to strike down earlier. They were right, because he led a five-member majority in United States v. Booker that made those guidelines advisory. In Kyllo v. United States in 2001, a 5-4 decision crossing ideological lines, he wrote that thermal imaging of a home was an unreasonable search. The scans had shown a garage hotter than the rest of the house because of indoor growing lights. R.A.V. v. St. Paul in 1990 struck down a hate speech ordinance used in a cross-burning prosecution. Scalia wrote, "Let there be no mistake about our belief that burning a cross in someone's front yard is reprehensible."

  District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 challenged the gun laws of the District. Scalia wrote the majority opinion finding an individual right to own a firearm under the Second Amendment. He traced the word "militia" as it was understood at ratification, when it meant "the body of all citizens." Liberals criticized the opinion and conservatives applauded it. Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit disagreed sharply, calling it "faux originalism" and a "historicizing glaze on personal values and policy preferences." In October 2008 Scalia replied that originalists needed only to show the right to bear arms had no exclusively military context in 1791-era understanding, and he said they had.

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• 7. Voice and Friendships

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  Oral argument was where Scalia's voice was first heard. He asked more questions and made more comments than any other justice. A 2005 study found he provoked laughter more often than any colleague. Social psychologist Lawrence Wrightsman of the University of Kansas wrote that he conveyed "a sense of urgency on the bench" and was "forever forceful." When John Roberts joined the Court in 2005, he began questioning lawyers in a similar way, and the two sometimes seemed to coordinate. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate said Scalia came to argument like a medieval knight, girded for battle, because he already knew what the opinion should say.

  His written style was just as distinctive. He wrote more concurring opinions than any other justice, and only two others have written more dissents. Kevin Ring, who compiled a book of his opinions, found them highly readable. Conor Clarke of Slate described the writing as "equal parts anger, confidence, and pageantry", with a taste for garish analogies. In Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health in 1990, Scalia said the issues were no better known to the nine justices than to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory.

  Bush v. Gore in 2000 produced one of his most quoted defenses. Scalia joined the majority per curiam opinion that effectively ended the Florida recounts, and he wrote separately as well. In 2007 he said of the case, "We did the right thing. So there!... get over it." On the Charlie Rose show he noted that the decision was 7-2 on the principal constitutional question. He said the country had been "the laughingstock of the world" because it could not tell who its next president would be. Judge Gilbert S. Merritt Jr. of the Sixth Circuit called for Scalia's recusal at the time. Republicans dismissed such calls as partisan, noting that Merritt was a close friend of the Gores.

  Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow in 2004 saw Scalia step aside. Michael Newdow, an atheist, challenged the Pledge of Allegiance in his daughter's classroom. Scalia had spoken at a Knights of Columbus event in Fredericksburg, Virginia, criticizing the Ninth Circuit ruling in Newdow's favor. When Newdow asked for recusal, Scalia withdrew without comment. In Cheney v. United States District Court in 2005 he refused. He had gone on a hunting trip with Vice President Dick Cheney and traveled one way on Air Force Two. His lengthy in-chambers opinion said the suit named Cheney only in his official capacity. It added that he was never alone with Cheney, never discussed the case, and saved no money because he bought the cheapest round-trip ticket. He recalled that Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson played poker with President Harry Truman and Justice Byron White skied with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Scalia was in the 7-2 majority that generally upheld Cheney's position. He later called the refusal his "most heroic opinion", because it exposed him to great criticism.

  Catholicism shaped his private life. Scalia was a devout traditionalist whose son Paul entered the priesthood. Uncomfortable with the changes that followed Vatican II, he drove long distances to parishes he felt matched his beliefs. They included parishes celebrating the Tridentine Latin Mass in Chicago and Washington, and St. Catherine of Siena in Great Falls, Virginia. In a 2013 interview with Jennifer Senior for New York magazine, he said the Devil is "a real person" and "standard Catholic doctrine." He added that the Devil's best trick now is "getting people not to believe in him or in God." In 2006, leaving church, he answered a reporter's question about being a traditionalist Catholic with a hand flick under the chin. The Boston Herald reported it as obscene. Scalia wrote to the editor that the staff watched too many episodes of The Sopranos and called it a strong brush-off. Stephen Colbert parodied the gesture at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner that year, and cameras showed Scalia laughing.

  John Boehner, then chairman of the House Republican Conference, said he tried to persuade Scalia to run for vice president with Bob Dole in 1996. Scalia listened and dictated the reply Justice Charles Evans Hughes had once given: "The possibility is too remote to comment upon, given my position." Dole listed him as a possible running mate but chose Jack Kemp.

  Maureen McCarthy married Scalia on the 10th of September 1960 at St. Pius X church in Yarmouth, Massachusetts. They had met on a blind date while he was at Harvard Law School and she was an undergraduate at Radcliffe College. The couple had five sons and four daughters. Eugene and John became attorneys, and Eugene later served as Secretary of Labor in the first Trump administration. Paul became a priest, Matthew had a military career, and Christopher became a writer. The daughters are Catherine, Ann, Margaret and Mary. The family lived in McLean, Virginia. Scalia said Maureen raised all nine children "with very little assistance from me."

  Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a member of the Court's liberal wing, was his close friend. They attended the opera together and appeared onstage as supernumeraries in Washington National Opera's 1994 production of Ariadne auf Naxos. The two families dined together every New Year's Eve. Ginsburg had been Scalia's colleague on the D.C. Circuit. He was also friendly with Elena Kagan. When Justice David Souter retired, Scalia told Obama adviser David Axelrod he hoped Obama would nominate Kagan, and a year later Obama did. An avid hunter, Scalia taught Kagan how to hunt, and they pursued ducks, birds, deer and antelope together.

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• 8. Death and Legacy

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  The morning of the 13th of February 2016 brought the news that Scalia had died in his sleep at age 79. His body was found in his room at Cibolo Creek Ranch near Shafter, in Presidio County, Texas. He had gone quail hunting the afternoon before and then dined as the guest of the ranch's owner, John B. Poindexter. After discovering the body, Poindexter called the Presidio County sheriff's department and asked for the number of the U.S. Marshals Service. He was reluctant to tell Sheriff Danny Dominguez who had died. Dominguez had the marshals call the ranch, and both they and the sheriff came to see the body.

  Juanita Bishop, the local justice of the peace, was out of town. County judge Cinderela Guevara pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing the body, which Texas law does not require. She ordered no autopsy. She said Sheriff Dominguez told her there were no signs of foul play and that Scalia had been having health issues. She also spoke by telephone with Scalia's physician, Rear Admiral Brian P. Monahan, who described a history of heart trouble including high blood pressure. Monahan said Scalia had recently been judged too weak for surgery on a torn rotator cuff. Bishop and another justice of the peace, David Beebe, later disagreed with the decision to skip an autopsy. Funeral director Chris Lujan of Sunset Funeral Home said Scalia's family also declined one after his body reached El Paso.

  Scalia's last majority opinion was in Kansas v. Carr in 2016, and his last dissent, and last opinion overall, came in FERC v. Electric Power Supply Association. His body lay in repose in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court Building on the 19th of February 2016. The next day Father Paul Scalia celebrated the funeral Mass and gave the homily at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. Vice President Joe Biden represented the Obama administration, and President Barack Obama did not attend. Scalia was interred at a private ceremony at Fairfax Memorial Park in Fairfax, Virginia.

  The circumstances of his death fed conspiracy theories that he had been murdered. Feeding them were the lack of an autopsy, a death pronouncement made by telephone, and Scalia's refusal of a Marshals Service security detail. Poindexter had also said at first that he found Scalia in bed with a pillow over his head. He later clarified that the pillow lay between the justice's head and the headboard, not over his face. William Ritchie, a former head of criminal investigations for the District of Columbia police, promoted the theory, as did talk show host Alex Jones. Donald Trump, then seeking the Republican presidential nomination, referred to the pillow on Michael Savage's radio show. Eugene Scalia rejected it: "our family just has no doubt that he was taken from us by natural causes."

  J. J. Goldberg wrote in The Jewish Daily Forward in 2009 that Scalia was "the intellectual anchor of the court's conservative majority." Scalia toured law schools giving talks on law and democracy, and his campus appearances were often standing room only. Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed that students now put "Federalist Society" on their resumes. John Paul Stevens, who served alongside him until 2010, said Scalia had "made a huge difference. Some of it constructive, some of it unfortunate." Among the nine sitting justices, Scalia was the most frequent subject of law review articles. In 2009, after nearly a quarter century on the Court, he described his victories as "damn few."

  Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, which Scalia co-authored with Bryan A. Garner in 2012, set out numerous canons for interpreting legal documents. Writing in the American Spectator, Adam Carrington noted that within seven years the book had been cited in over 1,000 state and federal cases. In one spring alone, Supreme Court justices referenced it in 10 cases. The liberal philosopher Ronald Dworkin said that because of Scalia, "we are all originalists now." Elena Kagan echoed him at her 2010 confirmation hearing. In a 2015 interview at Harvard Law School honoring her colleague, she declared that "we are all textualists now."

  Honors followed his death. In 2017 Harvard University established an endowed professorship at its law school in his honor, held since the 1st of July 2021 by Stephen E. Sachs. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University bears his name. Derrick Wang's opera Scalia/Ginsburg dramatizes the friendship between Scalia and Ginsburg. It was introduced before both justices at the Supreme Court in 2013 and premiered at the Castleton Festival in 2015. A revised version, reworked after Scalia's death, was broadcast on national radio on the 7th of November 2020. John Strand's play The Originalist, performed in Washington in 2015, imagines Scalia's encounter with a fictional liberal court clerk. The two criticize one another and eventually come to support each other. The play aired on PBS in 2017.

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