Appointed by President Ronald Reagan and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 1986, Scalia soon became known for his aggressive style of oral argument and his uncompromising, though idiosyncratic, legal conservatism.
His written opinions, especially in dissent, were admired for their elegance and intellectual rigor but sometimes faulted for their tone of unrelenting outrage and their vituperative attacks on the contrary views of other justices. As the proponent of his own brand of originalism in statutory and constitutional interpretation, Scalia held that laws and the Constitution ought to be understood according to the original public meanings of the words in which they were written. He specifically rejected the use of legislative history (the documentary history of a law) as a means of determining what a statute meant, a practice that had been common in Supreme Court opinions before his appointment. Among his most famous dissenting opinions was that in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), in which he accused the majority of signing on to the "so-called homosexual agenda" by striking down a state antisodomy law. His most important majority decision was District of Columbia v. Heller(2008), in which he held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms independent of service in a state militia.
Scalia's death was likely to affect the outcome of several important undecided cases on which the court had seemed to be divided along conservative-liberal lines (i.e., by a likely vote of 5 to 4). His passing immediately forced both Republican and Democratic candidates in the 2016 presidential election to address the issue of his replacement, and it set off a political battle between Republicans in the Senate, who vowed not to hold confirmation hearings for any new justice until after the presidential election, and Democratic President Barack Obama, who insisted on exercising his constitutional prerogative to appoint justices to the Supreme Court.
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