One memory of Justice Antonin Scalia that comes back to me in the shock I feel at the news of his death.
It was toward the end of an spring afternoon party in McLean, Va., where Scalia lived and where he had many friends. As he was about to leave, he turned to me and with a big grin said, “I’ve got to go home and write a dissent.” I didn’t know then and don’t know now which case he was going to write about, but anyone who read his dissents knows that he was not afraid to ridicule the majority opinion.
But by all accounts, he remained on a solidly friendly basis with all of them. For example, Scalia and his wife Maureen had a close relationship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her late husband Martin.
Scalia will go down in history as a great justice, with a profound effect on the law in many different areas which I won’t attempt to describe. But perhaps I can shed light on something I haven’t yet heard others mention: his dedication to public service.
Scalia served in the Justice Department during the Nixon and Ford administrations and afterwards became a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. In 1982 he accepted an appointment by Ronald Reagan as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This involved a considerable financial sacrifice. The University of Chicago had a policy then of paying college tuition — at any college — for the children of faculty members. The Scalias had nine children, most or all of whom had not finished college at the time of his appointment.
We have lost not just a great justice, but a wonderful human being.
