This year has been full of milestone anniversaries related to the life and career of my father, the late Justice Antonin Scalia. February marked the tenth anniversary of his death, and he would have turned 90 in March — occasions for bittersweet remembrances. This summer includes happier anniversaries: it’s been 40 years since his nomination and confirmation.
I was ten years old then and cannot claim I knew the significance of these events at the time, though I could tell something big was going on. On June 17, 1986, the day President Reagan announced Dad’s nomination (along with Justice Rehnquist’s elevation to the position of chief justice), my siblings and I were kept in the dark. It was weird, though, that my stay-at-home mother had gone downtown for undisclosed reasons and that a neighbor’s nanny came over to babysit and make sure my older brother, younger sister, and I were in front of the television that afternoon. When the networks interrupted their regularly scheduled programming for a special report, we saw Dad on TV, standing next to the president.
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