WASHINGTON—Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia kept your attention, whether you liked him or not.
He was a big personality who rather enjoyed the spotlight, and he did not often shy from controversy.
Scalia deeply influenced a generation of conservative legal thinkers and was a lightning rod for criticism from the left almost from the moment President Ronald Reagan put him on the court in 1986.
A gifted writer who produced gems and barbs in equal measure, Scalia even occasionally took aim at his usual allies if they disagreed with his view of a case.
Scalia died overnight Friday. The justice, 79, would have been 80 next month.
Like all justices, he liked to be in the majority. But Scalia himself said he also liked writing dissents because that justice did not have to pull punches, as the author of the court’s majority opinion must sometimes do to ensure his opinion keeps its five votes.
In dissent, Scalia said, he was able to write opinions the way they should be written. He wrote dissents that were entertaining, clear-headed, furious, sarcastic and sometimes just plain mean.
His close friend, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, once said that Scalia was “an absolutely charming man, and he can make even the most sober judge laugh.” She said that she urged her friend to tone down his dissenting opinions “because he'll be more effective if he is not so polemical. I’m not always successful.”
His dissents in cases involving gay rights could be as biting as they were prescient.
“By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition,” Scalia wrote in dissent in 2013 when the court struck down part of a federal anti-gay marriage law. Less than a year later, federal judges in Kentucky, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia cited Scalia’s dissent in their opinions striking down all or parts of state bans on same-sex marriage.
