Antonin Scalia Analysis

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Antonin Scalia was born in Trenton N.J. on March 11, 1936. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1960 and later taught law at the University of Virginia from 1967 to 1971. He was also a professor at the University of Chicago from 1977 to 1982. He was appointed to the federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan. Four years later he was nominated to the United States Supreme Court by Reagan, taking the seat previously held by William Rehnquist ascended to the position of chief justice. Scalia was sometimes referred to as the first chief justice of Italian-American descent, but he is also known as the first Roman Catholic to be appointed to the nation's highest court since William J. Brennan. Scalia …show more content…

This was in direct conflict with the more commonly held view that the Constitution is a "living document," allowing courts to take into account the views of contemporary society. In Justice Scalia's view, the Constitution was not supposed to facilitate change but to obstruct change to citizens' basic fundamental rights and responsibilities. Justice Scalia despised "judicial activism," which is when judges substitute their own political opinions for the law, or when judges act like a legislature from the bench rather than a traditional court. Scalia believed the place for implementing change was in the legislature, where the will of the people are …show more content…

Basically, the principles in the Constitution are vague. It would have been impossible for the framers to have written out every possible situation and explained how the principles applied to that situation. Furthermore, such a complex code would barely be understood by the public. For that reason they are general principles and from there we infer particular applications. For example, although the First Amendment only explicitly mentions speech and press, we include things like handwritten letters and now

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