Antonin Scalia

The late justice showed how originalism was a favorable philosophy to criminal defendants.

Nino would not approve.

Neal Katyal is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells. He has served as acting solicitor general of the United States and orally argued 35 cases before the Supreme Court. Also, he appeared in House of Cards, playing himself. That’s a pretty…

Activists who oppose abortion doubted Donald Trump when he was a candidate because he had once described himself as "very pro-choice." A year into his presidency, however, they happily point to victories he has achieved for them.

Among the many reasons to give the book Scalia Speaks for Christmas are its collected speeches on religion. And of these speeches, my favorite is “Being Different,” which the justice gave in 1992 to the Judicial Prayer Breakfast Group, an informal gathering of judicial officers in the Washington,…

Seeking a gift for the American who has everything? (And don’t so many of us.) Let me suggest two of my favorite books published in 2017: Carl Cannon’s On This Date: From the Pilgrims to Today, Discovering America One Day at a Time or the late Antonin Scalia’s Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law,…

Justice Scalia was a terrific writer. And he thought about the craft, and what it requires. A short speech titled “Writing Well,” given to a group of legal writers who were giving him a lifetime achievement award, is fantastic.

Published last week, Scalia Speaks is a collection of the justice’s speeches edited by his son Christopher and the lawyer Ed Whelan. The book has six parts, the first of which is “On the American People and Ethnicity.”

“When I was in law teaching,” recalled Antonin Scalia in a speech just days before his 1986 nomination to the Supreme Court, “I was fond of doing what is called ‘teaching against the class’—that is, taking positions that the students were almost certain to disagree with, in order to generate some…

I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed reading a collection of speeches. This may be due to the fact that most or maybe all I’ve read are political, and political speeches, even those authored by literate and capable politicians, lose their significance almost immediately. But perhaps the more important…

“When I was in law teaching,” recalled Antonin Scalia in a speech just days before his 1986 nomination to the Supreme Court, “I was fond of doing what is called ‘teaching against the class’—that is, taking positions that the students were almost certain to disagree with, in order to generate some…

Later this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes hearings on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. Although the Committee will have a lot of legitimate issues to consider, some outsiders are trying to interest it in two unusual topics: natural…

The new minority leader in the Senate, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, said Tuesday he would "absolutely" attempt to keep open the Supreme Court seat once held by the late justice Antonin Scalia. "It's hard for me to imagine a nominee that Donald Trump would choose that would get Republican…

Over the weekend I received emails from two very smart conservative lawyer friends about who President Donald Trump should nominate to take the late Antonin Scalia's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The first mounted a strong argument for Joan Larsen—about whom I had known relatively little. When I…

Being the one branch of government most removed from the chattering masses (the internet, in other words), the Supreme Court had never once held a live video webcast—until Friday afternoon, that is.

In this down year for conservatives one bright spot has been the renaming of George Mason University's law school in honor of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

The January 1973 issue of National Lampoon boasted a now-infamous cover: a man's hand aims a revolver at a wary dog, above the headline: "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog."

In this down year for conservatives one bright spot has been the renaming of George Mason University’s law school in honor of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg again feels compelled to urge the Senate to vote on President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the seat held by the late justice Antonin Scalia. At an event this week for incoming law students at Georgetown University, Ginsburg said the Senate should vote on…

On the eve of the Republican National Convention, President Obama published a piece in the Wall Street Journal lamenting "congressional inaction" on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. We have heard that term before, of course. Obama has often used congressional inaction…

It was a pleasant surprise to learn that Harvey Mansfield's latest "Conversation with Bill Kristol" is a discussion of his wonderful 1993 book, America's Constitutional Soul. But I was all the more pleased to tune in and discover how Kristol begins their discussion: by comparing America's…

Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland joked about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday, saying it came "at a good time" for union workers since he was unable to cast the deciding vote in a March case that ended up in a 4-4 deadlock.

Since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February, the Obama administration and its allies have insisted that a failure to confirm D.C. circuit judge Merrick Garland to replace him would result in chaos. In the absence of an odd number of justices, the story went, the Supreme Court wouldn't be able…

In the May 9th issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, the Scrapbook reports a particularly shameful episode of campus outrage. Recently, at George Mason University, thuggish puritanical progressivism apotheosized in a meeting of the university's faculty senate and a vote to disapprove of naming the law…

The late justice Antonin Scalia thought his best opinion was his dissent in Morrison v. Olson, a case decided on June 29, 1988, when he was finishing just his second term on the Supreme Court. At issue was the constitutionality of the independent counsel law, first passed in 1978. By a vote of…

In 1998, Justice Antonin Scalia attended the funeral service for Justice Lewis Powell at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Virginia. At the luncheon afterwards Scalia looked for the church's pastor, the Rev. James Goodloe. Unable to find him, Scalia wrote Goodloe a letter telling him…

In the aftermath of Justice Scalia's untimely passing, the outpouring of remembrances describe his astonishing legal career: a Supreme Court justice, of course, and before that a D.C. Circuit judge, a University of Chicago law professor, and chief of the Ford Administration's Office of Legal…

Rarely has the United States been so neatly split as it is now. One party holds complete control of Congress while the other holds the presidency--a scenario that has happened only a quarter of the time since 1855.

If politics is the art of the possible, as Bismarck once said, then The Scrapbook’s corollary is especially germane these days: Politics is the art of getting away with as much hypocrisy as possible. Both parties are prone to this annoying habit, of course; but in the week since the sudden death of…

In January, The Scrapbook was privileged to be in attendance at a speech Antonin Scalia gave to a small audience at Catholic University. We can’t claim to have known the man or even to have met him for more than a handshake, but Scalia was such a presence that even being in the same room with him…

A few days before Justice Antonin Scalia passed away, I stumbled upon a monograph published in 1979 by the American Enterprise Institute, a debate titled "A Constitutional Convention: How Well Would It Work?" The subject matter, though interesting, paled in comparison to the names of the…

The literary critic Edmund Wilson was ambivalent about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, but he didn't doubt Lincoln's genius as a writing man. "Alone among American Presidents," Wilson wrote, "it is possible to imagine Lincoln, grown up in a different milieu, becoming a distinguished writer of a not…

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid took to the pages of the Washington Post recently to write about Republican efforts to block any nominee to replace Justice Scalia. In drearily predictable fashion, the op-ed is headlined, "For the good of the country, stop your nakedly partisan obstruction."

Texas senator Ted Cruz put his opposition to the president's pending Supreme Court nominee in the starkest terms yet, saying he would filibuster any name the White House submitted.

The first time I saw Justice Antonin Scalia in the flesh was in college. He came to speak at my school, which was a broadly apolitical place. There were no protests. He gave a brief talk on the idea of originalism—easily the most engaging lecture of my four years—and then he took questions. For…

The WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with editor William Kristol on the death of Antonin Scalia.

When I was first saw the San Antonio newspaper was reporting Nino Scalia's death, I fervently hoped it wasn't true. But then there were other reports, and emails from friends, and hope was replaced by shock, and by grief.

On June 28, the Supreme Court resolved two important abortion cases.

The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite. The constitutional amendment before us here is not the manifestation of a "'bare . . . desire to harm'" homosexuals, but is rather a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a…

The Court has mistaken a Kulturkampf for a fit of spite. The constitutional amendment before us here is not the manifestation of a "'bare . . . desire to harm'" homosexuals, but is rather a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a…