A great American, Antonin Scalia, was born on this day, March 11, in 1936 in Trenton, New Jersey.
The son of a teacher of Italian and other romance languages, he would grow up in Queens, go to a Jesuit high school in Manhattan, go to college at Georgetown, go to law school at Harvard, and teach at The University of Chicago before being appointed by President Reagan to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then to the United States Supreme Court.
He died, alas, in February 2016.
On other occasions I have noted various among his contributions to the development of American jurisprudence.
Today I take a brief moment to remember him fondly by celebrating his wit.
He was a man of principle. Called on a year before his death to give the commencement address at his own granddaughter’s graduation, he told her graduating class: “Never compromise your principles, unless of course your principles are Adolf Hitler’s, in which case you would be well advised to compromise them as much as you can.”
He was a gentleman and a courteous, if powerful, opponent in debate. He once told an interviewer at CBS News, “I love to argue. I’ve always loved to argue. And I love to point out the weaknesses of the opposing arguments. It may well be that I’m something of a shin kicker.”
He loved his life as a lawyer. But he confessed to the musicians, dancers, and other artists of the Juilliard School in remarks there in 2005, “The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.”
He was, as Erasmus said of Thomas More, “born for friendship” and he made many strong and lasting friendships (including with people with whom he often disagreed, famously including the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg). But, as he told Charlie Rose in an interview in 2012, “A man who has made no enemies is probably not a very good man.”
Happy Nino’s Birthday!