Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, United States Supreme Court, will deliver the 1996 Robison Lecture, "On Interpreting the Constitution," at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24, in T. Fleming Fieldhouse, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois.

Scalia has served on the Court since 1986. "While Justice Scalia is properly regarded as a judicial conservative, he has authored or joined in some opinions that could be characterized as 'conservative,' and others that could be characterized as 'liberal'," said Lane Sunderland, Chancie Ferris Booth Professor of Political Science at Knox and an expert on the Constitution and the Supreme Court.

"In 1989, Justice Scalia joined a majority of the Court in ruling that the burning of the American flag as a form of political protest is protected by the First Amendment," Sunderland said. "In a case involving drug testing of employees, he opposed the court majority, arguing that suspicionless drug testing was a fundamental violation of the Fourth Amendment."

"In 1990, he delivered the opinion of the court in Oregon vs. Smith, in which it was ruled that the use of hallucinogenic drugs for religious purposes was not protected by the Constitution. Earlier this year, he was the lone dissenter in the Virginia Military Institute case, in which he stated that the proper procedure for admitting women is the one followed by the U.S. military academies, which were opened to women by the people, through their elected representatives," Sunderland said.

Scalia has been described as a "textualist," who believes that judges should apply the actual language of the Constitution and laws, rather than search for deeper meaning or broader social purposes. "Justice Scalia has argued that in cases of cultural issues, states and the democratic process are more legitimate than Supreme

Court pronouncements," said Sunderland, author of a new book on the Supreme Court, Popular Government and the Supreme Court: Securing the Public Good and Private Rights.

Scalia received his law degree in 1960 from Harvard Law School, where he served as editor of the Harvard Law Review and was a Sheldon fellow. He practiced law from 1961 to 1967 with the firm Jones, Day, Cockley and Reavis in Cleveland, Ohio, then taught law until 1971 at the University of Virginia.

Scalia served as general counsel in the President's Office of Telecommunications Policy in 1971-72, as chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States from 1972 to 1974, then as Assistant United States Attorney General until 1977.

From 1977 to 1982, Scalia taught law at the University of Chicago. In 1982 he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, then in 1986 to the United States Supreme Court.

The Robison Lecture series was established in 1987 by Charles B. Robison of Des Plaines, Illinois. A native of Lewistown, Robison is a 1934 Knox graduate now retired after a distinguished career in the field of insurance law.

Founded in 1837, Knox is an independent, four-year, liberal arts college, located in Galesburg, Illinois, with 1,100 students from 42 states and 33 nations. Knox's "Old Main," a National Historic Landmark, is the only building remaining from the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Editor's Note: Audiotaping and videotaping will not be allowed during Justice Scalia's lecture. Following the lecture, Justice Scalia will take questions from the audience, but he will not discuss cases currently before the court, or likely to come before the court.