U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia found dead at West Texas ranch

Scalia, 79, was a guest at the Cibolo Creek Ranch, a resort in the Big Bend region south of Marfa.
According to a report, Scalia arrived at the ranch on Friday and attended a private party with about 40 people. When he did not appear for breakfast, a person associated with the ranch went to his room and found a body.

Family Influence

Antonin Gregory Scalia was born on March 11, 1936, in Trenton, to Salvatore Scalia and the former Catherine Panaro. He was their only child and was showered with attention from his parents and their siblings, none of whom had children of their own.

Justice Scalia and his wife, the former Maureen McCarthy, had nine children, the upshot of what he called Vatican roulette. “We were both devout Catholics,” Justice Scalia told Joan Biskupic for her 2009 biography, “American Original.” “And being a devout Catholic means you have children when God gives them to you, and you raise them.”

He said his large family influenced his legal philosophy.

“Parents know that children will accept quite readily all sorts of arbitrary substantive dispositions — no television in the afternoon, or no television in the evening, or even no television at all,” he said at a Harvard lecture in 1989. “But try to let one brother or sister watch television when the others do not, and you will feel the fury of the fundamental sense of justice unleashed.”

Young Antonin was an exceptional student, graduating as valedictorian from Xavier High School in Lower Manhattan, first in his class at Georgetown and magna cum laude at Harvard Law School.

He practiced law for six years in Cleveland before accepting a position teaching law at the University of Virginia in 1967. Four years later, he entered government service, first as general counsel of the Office of Telecommunications Policy and then as chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an executive branch agency that advises federal regulators. Both positions drew on and expanded his expertise in administrative law, a topic that would interest him throughout his career.

In 1974, President Richard M. Nixon nominated him to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, an elite unit of the Justice Department that advises the executive branch on the law. He was confirmed by the Senate on August 22, 1974, not long after Mr. Nixon resigned.

In 1977, Mr. Scalia returned to the legal academy, now joining the law faculty at the University of Chicago. He also served as editor of Regulation magazine, published by the American Enterprise Institute.

After President Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Mr. Scalia was interviewed for a job he coveted, solicitor general of the United States, the lawyer who represents the federal government in the Supreme Court. He lost out to Rex E. Lee, and it stung. “I was bitterly disappointed,” Justice Scalia told Ms. Biskupic. “I never forgot it.”

He was offered a seat on the federal appeals court in Chicago. But he turned it down in the hope of being nominated instead to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whose docket, location and prestige appealed to him. The court was also widely viewed as a steppingstone to the Supreme Court