Antonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the history of the Supreme Court. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.

Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey. A devout Catholic, he attended the Jesuit Xavier High School before receiving his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. Scalia went on to graduate from Harvard Law School and spent six years at Jones Day before becoming a law professor at the University of Virginia. In the early 1970s, he served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, eventually becoming an assistant attorney general under President Gerald Ford. He spent most of the Carter years teaching at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the first faculty advisers of the fledgling Federalist Society. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed Scalia as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Four years later, Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court, where Scalia became its first Italian-American justice following a unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate 98–0.

Scalia espoused a conservative jurisprudence and ideology, advocating textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation. He peppered his colleagues with "Ninograms" (memos named for his nickname, "Nino") intending to persuade them to his point of view. He was a strong defender of the powers of the executive branch and believed that the U.S. Constitution permitted the death penalty and did not guarantee the right to either abortion or same-sex marriage. Furthermore, Scalia viewed affirmative action and other policies that afforded special protected status to minority groups as unconstitutional. Such positions would earn him a reputation as one of the most conservative justices on the Court. He filed separate opinions in many cases, often castigating the Court's majority—sometimes scathingly so.

Scalia's most significant opinions include his lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson (arguing against the constitutionality of an Independent-Counsel law), and his majority opinions in Crawford v. Washington (defining a criminal defendant's confrontation right under the Sixth Amendment) and District of Columbia v. Heller (holding that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees an individual right to handgun ownership).

Scalia was born on March 11, 1936, in Trenton, New Jersey. He was the only child of Salvatore Eugenio "Eugene" Scalia (1903–1986), an Italian immigrant from Sommatino, Sicily. Salvatore graduated from Rutgers University and was a graduate student at Columbia University and clerk at the time of his son's birth. The elder Scalia would become a professor of Romance languages at Brooklyn College, where he was an adherent to the formalist New Criticism school of literary theory. Scalia's mother, Catherine Louise (née Panaro; 1905–1985), was born in Trenton to Italian immigrant parents and worked as an elementary school teacher.

In 1939, Scalia and his family moved to Elmhurst, Queens, where he attended P.S. 13 Clement C. Moore School. After completing eighth grade, he obtained an academic scholarship to Xavier High School, a Jesuit military school in Manhattan, from which he graduated ranked first in his class in 1953. Scalia achieved a 97.5 average at Xavier, earning decorations in Latin, Greek, and debate, among other subjects, in addition to being a distinguished member of its Glee club. He later reflected that he spent much of his time on schoolwork and admitted, "I was never cool."

While a youth, Scalia was also active as a Boy Scout and was part of the Scouts' national honor society, the Order of the Arrow. Classmate and future New York State official William Stern remembered Scalia in his high school days: "This kid was a conservative when he was 17 years old. An archconservative Catholic. He could have been a member of the Curia. He was the top student in the class. He was brilliant, way above everybody else."

In 1953, Scalia enrolled at Georgetown University, where he majored in history. He became a champion collegiate debater in Georgetown's Philodemic Society and a critically praised thespian. He took his junior year abroad in Switzerland at the University of Fribourg. Scalia graduated from Georgetown in 1957 as class valedictorian with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude. Scalia then went to Harvard Law School, where he was a notes editor for the Harvard Law Review. He graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Laws, magna cum laude, among the top of the class. During his time at Harvard, Scalia was awarded a Sheldon Fellowship, which allowed him to travel abroad in Europe during 1960 and 1961.