In the early 1970s, he served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, eventually becoming an Assistant Attorney General under President Gerald Ford. 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 School of Law. A devout Catholic, he attended Xavier High School before receiving his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 by President Donald Trump, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.

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.

He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the U.S. Antonin Gregory Scalia ( / ˌ æ n t ə n ɪ n s k ə ˈ l iː ə/ ( listen) 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.

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