“What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?”

American jurist

Antonin Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He became a leading figure on the Court’s conservative side, known for championing originalism and textualism. Scalia helped shape modern debates over constitutional interpretation and is widely linked with a larger originalist and textualist movement in American law. He has been described as among the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and his name was later given to the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.