Geoffrey Stone's Remembrance of the Antonin Scalia He Knew

Tough, Brilliant, and Kind: The Antonin Scalia I Knew

I  first met Antonin Scalia in the winter of 1977. He had just completed a five-year stint in the Executive Branch serving Presidents Nixon and Ford.  With Jimmy Carter’s election, Nino, as he was known, needed something else to do. He had spent some time earlier as a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, and decided that a return to academia made sense. He applied for a position at the University of Chicago Law School, where I was then a relatively young faculty member.

The faculty voted to offer Nino a position, and he joined us that fall. Nino was then forty-one and I was thirty. Because we both taught Constitutional Law, we became not only colleagues, but friends. We agreed about almost nothing and we argued constantly. I was an ACLU-type who had served as a law clerk to the very liberal Justice William Brennan and who very much admired the achievements of the Warren Court. He was of a rather different frame of mind. But our arguments, though intense, were always respectful and productive. 

At the personal level, Nino and I both had daughters who were in school together and we both participated regularly in the Law School faculty’s monthly poker game. Nino was lively, engaging, smart, and funny. He used to make up absurd games for us to play when he was the dealer. He could be quite charming, even though he was “wrong” about most things legal.

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