Alito opens up about Scalia's lasting influence on the Court — and what the late justice never lived to see

Justice Samuel Alito sat down in his Supreme Court chambers last February and did something rare for a sitting justice: he spoke candidly about missing a colleague. In a 90-minute interview with Newsmax chief Washington correspondent James Rosen — published this week by Politico Magazine — Alito reflected on the legacy of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the originalist titan who reshaped American law and died before he could witness its fullest vindication.

The interview was supposed to last an hour. It ran half again as long. What emerged was not a policy discussion or a legal seminar but something closer to a eulogy from a man still carrying the weight of his friend's unfinished work.

"Even since Nino died, things are so different. I so often wish he were still here. He started so much, and it would have been good to have him around to see it to completion."

"Nino" — the nickname reserved for close friends and family. Ten years after Scalia's death, Alito still reaches for it like a man reaching for a chair that's been moved.

The Intellectual Debt Behind Dobbs

Rosen asked Alito directly whether the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision — the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the regulation of abortion to the states — was "indebted to Antonin Scalia in any meaningful respect." Alito didn't hedge, according to Fox News.

"Yes, absolutely, because that was my effort to write an originalist's opinion… I think I learned from the model of [District of Columbia v.] Heller."

Heller, of course, was Scalia's landmark 2008 gun rights opinion — the case that established the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. It was also a masterclass in originalist reasoning: anchored in the text, built from historical meaning, indifferent to the policy preferences of the bench. Alito used it as a blueprint.

Then came the line that will stick with Court watchers for a long time:

"I don't know that Nino would have written [Dobbs] any differently. I flatter myself to think that he wouldn't have written it very differently. And the language, to a degree, may be influenced by him."

That's not ego. That's a craftsman identifying his teacher. Scalia spent three decades arguing — often from dissent — that Roe had no constitutional foundation. He never got the majority to agree. Alito did. And when he wrote the words that dismantled the 1973 decision, he built them on Scalia's scaffolding.

Returning Power to the People

The Dobbs opinion itself reads like the culmination of everything Scalia argued for and everything the legal left spent fifty years pretending didn't need arguing:

"The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives."

That word — "arrogated" — does the heavy lifting. The Court didn't impose a national ban. It didn't legislate from the bench. It did the opposite: it acknowledged that seven justices in 1973 had seized a power the Constitution never gave them and handed it back to voters and their state legislatures. The democratic process, not a judicial decree.

The left still frames Dobbs as the Court "taking away" a right. But the ruling's plain language says the opposite. The Court returned a question to self-governance — exactly where originalism says it belongs when the Constitution is silent.

What Scalia Would Have Thought

The interview's most poignant moment came when Rosen shared a private sentiment from one of Scalia's children. The unnamed daughter had told Rosen she was grateful to God for taking her father when He did — because it meant Scalia did not have to witness much that would have been upsetting to him.

Alito's response was brief and loaded:

"He would have been appalled at so much."

Neither man elaborated. Neither man needed to. The last decade of American public life has provided no shortage of material for a constitutional originalist's dismay — institutions bending to political fashion, legal reasoning subordinated to ideological outcomes, a culture that increasingly treats the Constitution as an obstacle rather than a foundation.

Scalia was a man who believed the Constitution said what it said and didn't say what it didn't say. He had no patience for penumbras, emanations, or judicial inventions dressed up as discovery. He would have had even less patience for a legal establishment that treats originalism as radical while treating the invention of unenumerated rights as settled science.

The Originalist Revolution He Lit But Didn't See

Scalia was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and began serving on the Supreme Court in 1986 — confirmed by a vote of 98-0, a number unimaginable in today's confirmation wars. He remained on the bench until February 13, 2016, when the world awoke to learn he had died in his sleep during a hunting trip in West Texas. He was 79.

What happened after his death would have astonished him. Three new originalist justices — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — joined Thomas and Alito to form a 6-3 conservative majority. Roe fell. The individual right to carry firearms outside the home was affirmed. The administrative state's unchecked authority began to face real judicial scrutiny.

Scalia built the intellectual architecture for all of it. He wrote his dissents not just for the record but — as he once explained — for law students. If his arguments were memorable enough to land in casebooks, future lawyers might find them persuasive. He was playing a generational game, and he won it.

Today, lawyers rarely appear before the Court without invoking an originalist reading of the Constitution or citing Scalia's other signature method, textualism. Alito himself, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005, has carried that torch as forcefully as anyone on the bench. He and Scalia overlapped for a decade. In that time, Alito absorbed not just the older justice's philosophy but his conviction that the law means something fixed — something not subject to renegotiation by judges who believe they know better than the citizens who ratified the document.

The Chair That's Still Empty

There is something striking about a sitting Supreme Court justice, nearly a decade later, still wishing his colleague were in the room. Not for the votes — the conservative majority is secure. Not for the legal reasoning — Alito clearly internalized Scalia's methods. For the presence. For the voice. For the man who started so much and deserved to see it land.

Scalia didn't live to see Dobbs. He didn't live to see Heller's logic extended or originalism become the dominant mode of constitutional interpretation. He didn't live to see three presidents invoke his name when selecting justices.

But his fingerprints are on every page. The man is gone. The revolution he started is not.