Antonin Gregory Scalia was born in 1936 in Trenton, New Jersey, the only child of Eugene and Catherine Scalia. In 1982, President Reagan appointed Scalia, who was then a law professor at the University of Chicago, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In September 1986, following a 98-0 confirmation by the Senate, Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court. One of the most significant justices in the history of the Court, he served for nearly thirty years before his death in February 2016. Antonin Scalia was married to Maureen for fifty-five years. Together they had nine children and dozens of grandchildren. Jeffrey S. Sutton, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, is a former law clerk to Justice Scalia. Judge Sutton teaches classes on federal and state constitutional law at Harvard Law School and The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. He and his wife, Peggy, have three children and live in Columbus, Ohio. Sutton is the author of 51 Imperfect Solutions- States and the Making of American Constitutional Law. Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a former law clerk to Justice Scalia. He is a leading commentator on the Supreme Court and on issues of constitutional law. Mr. Whelan co-edited two other collections of Justice Scalia's work, Scalia Speaks- Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived and On Faith- Lessons from an American Believer. A father of four, he lives with his family in the D.C. area.
If you know a student who has recently started or returned to law school, you might want to give that aspiring lawyer a short volume of supplemental . . . reading about our Constitution and legal tradition. . . . You can do your part by sharing with them this latest and perhaps most subversive collection. -National Review The editors of The Essential Scalia have skillfully collected and excerpted Scalia's judicial writings and a few speeches and articles, and the results are as readable today as they were when they first appeared. That is no mean feat. . . . What makes so many of his opinions worth reading and rereading is not what they say about a particular statute or constitutional dispute but what they say about statutory construction or constitutional interpretation in general. . . . The book will be especially illuminating to anyone who wants to unlock the mystery of why [Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg admired Scalia-or who wants to get a sense of where the Supreme Court may be headed. -The Wall Street Journal It would be difficult to name other Supreme Court justices who have had such a galvanizing effect on American politics-and who continued to play such important roles after their deaths. . . . What comes across most . . . is the quality of Scalia's writing. It is clear, direct, witty, lapidary, memorable. Scalia's opinions and dissents are famous for certain lines-'this wolf comes as a wolf'; 'What Is Golf?'-but on second reading it is the way he develops his argument that most impresses. And he always makes a perfect landing. . . . These aren't judicial decisions. They are essays. And like great literature they will reverberate far into the future. -The Washington Free Beacon