SCALIA, ANTONIN

born March 11, 1936, Trenton, N.J., U.S. associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1986, well-known for his strong legal conservatism. The son of a Sicilian immigrant father and an Italian-American mother, he received a Roman Catholic parochial education in New York City and graduated at the top of his class from Georgetown University (A.B., 1957), Washington, D.C. He went to Harvard Law School, editing the prestigious Law Review and graduating in 1960. He worked for a Cleveland law firm from 1961 to 1967, taught law at the University of Virginia Law School from 1967 to 1974, and served as assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1974 to 1977. Returning to academia full-time, Scalia taught at the law school of the University of Chicago from 1977 until President Ronald W. Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, in 1982. He served there until chosen by Reagan to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1986. Scalia tended to oppose judicial activism and to favour judicial restraint and also tended to interpret narrowly the laws of Congress and to interpret more leniently state and local laws (unless they were in irreconcilable conflict with federal law or with conservative constitutional principles).