(CNN) – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at the age of 79, a government source and a family friend told CNN on Saturday.
Scalia died in his sleep during a visit to Texas.
A government official said Scalia went to bed Friday night and told friends he wasn’t feeling well. Saturday morning, he didn’t get up for breakfast. And the group he was with for a hunting trip left without him.
Someone at the ranch went in to check on him and found him unresponsive.
The first Italian-American to sit on the nation’s highest court, Scalia was a conservative in thought, but not in personality.
The jaunty jurist was able to light up, or ignite, a room with his often brash demeanor and wicked sense of humor, grounded always in a profound respect for American law and its constitutional traditions.
“What can I say,” was a favorite phrase of the man colleagues knew as “Nino.” As it turned out, quite a lot.
“Justice Scalia had an irrepressibly pugnacious personality,” said Edward Lazarus, a former Supreme Clerk law clerk who wrote about the experience in “Closed Chambers.”
“And even in his early years of the Court, that came out at oral argument when he was the most aggressive questioner. And behind the scenes, where the memos he would write– what were called ‘Ninograms’– inside the court had a real galvanizing effect on the debate among the justices.”
