Justice Samuel Alito says he often wishes Antonin Scalia were still alive — and that the man who reshaped American jurisprudence would be horrified by what he'd see if he were.
In a recently published Politico Magazine interview conducted by Newsmax chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, Alito spoke candidly about the intellectual giant who preceded him in defining the originalist movement on the Supreme Court. The remarks amount to something rare from a sitting justice: an unguarded reflection on loss, legacy, and a legal philosophy that outlived its architect.
"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."
The nickname "Nino" signals familiarity and genuine affection. Alito wasn't delivering a eulogy for cameras. He was talking about a colleague whose absence he still feels a decade after Scalia's death in 2016.
Then came the sharper line.
"He would have been appalled at so much."
Alito didn't elaborate on what, specifically, would have appalled Scalia. He didn't need to. Anyone paying attention to American law, culture, and institutional drift over the last decade can fill in the blanks.
As reported by Fox News, Rosen asked Alito whether the 2022 Dobbs decision — which struck down the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and returned abortion authority to state legislatures — was "indebted to Antonin Scalia in any meaningful respect."
Alito didn't hedge.
"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, the landmark 2008 gun rights case, was Scalia's masterwork — a rigorous originalist opinion that affirmed the Second Amendment as an individual right. Alito identified it as the template for his own approach in Dobbs, a through-line that connects two of the most consequential rulings in modern constitutional law.
In the Dobbs opinion itself, Alito wrote:
"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 language — direct, constitutionally grounded, unapologetic — carries Scalia's fingerprints even if Scalia never read a word of it. Alito acknowledged as much.
"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."
There's a humility in that phrasing worth noting. Alito isn't claiming equivalence with Scalia. He's saying the method survived the man — that originalism as a discipline is bigger than any single jurist, even the one who did more than anyone to make it dominant.
One of the most striking details in the piece didn't come from Alito at all. Rosen conveyed to Alito that one of Scalia's children — a 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.
That's a remarkable thing for a daughter to say. Not bitter. Not angry. Relieved — on her father's behalf — that he was spared the sight of what came next.
It also tracks with Alito's own assessment. The two people who knew Scalia's mind and temperament best — a close colleague and his own child — arrived independently at the same conclusion: the trajectory of American public life since 2016 would have grieved him.
The timeline tells a story that the legal left still struggles to accept. Scalia joined the Court in 1986, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and spent three decades making the case that the Constitution means what it says — not what five justices wish it said. He built the intellectual infrastructure. He wrote the dissents that became future majority opinions. He made originalism respectable in an academy that treated it as quaint at best, dangerous at worst.
Alito, appointed by George W. Bush in 2005, joined the bench in 2006 and eventually carried the project forward. Dobbs didn't arrive out of nowhere. It arrived because decades of originalist jurisprudence made it inevitable — because Scalia planted seeds that bore fruit six years after his death.
The left understood this, which is why they treated Dobbs not as a legal ruling but as an existential crisis. They weren't just losing a policy outcome. They were watching an entire theory of constitutional interpretation — one that says the Court doesn't get to legislate from the bench — prove that it works.
Alito's comment that Scalia "started so much" and that "it would have been good to have him around to see it to completion" implies the project isn't done. Originalism has won major victories — Heller on guns, Dobbs on abortion — but the broader question of how much judicial activism the Court is willing to undo remains open.
That's the real significance of Alito's interview. It isn't nostalgia. It's a sitting justice acknowledging that the legal battles ahead are substantial enough to make him wish for reinforcements — specifically, the one mind he most trusted to get it right.
Scalia died in 2016 at the peak of a cultural revolution he saw coming more clearly than most. His dissents on issues from religious liberty to the administrative state read today less like minority opinions and more like prophecy. Alito knows this. Scalia's daughter knows this.
The originalist project outlived its founder. Whether it can finish what he started depends on whether the justices who inherited it fight with the same clarity he brought to every opinion he ever wrote.
Scalia built the foundation. The question now is who finishes the house.
