"Scalia doesn't come into oral argument all secretive and sphinxlike, feigning indecision on the nuances of the case before him. He comes in like a medieval knight, girded for battle. He knows what the law is. He knows what the opinion should say. And he uses the hour allocated for argument to bludgeon his brethren into agreement. Usually this is sort of fun and charming . . . [and] it's starting to affect the other justices . . . While I don't always agree with Justice Scalia, I am always awed and moved by his brilliance." -Dahlia Lithwick

Justice Scalia is the premiere Supreme Court Justice of our time, and arguably the most powerful writer to sit on the bench since the departure of Justice Black. None-the-less, there lingers a widespread misunderstanding of Scalia's jurisprudence, which is at least as pervasive among admirers, if not more so, than it is among detractors.

The purpose of the Ninoville Project, then, is to fight misunderstanding by providing information. We hope to become the premiere internet resource relating to Justice Scalia; while there are directories of Scalia opinions at LII and Oyez.org, these are far from complete, and provide no mechanism for searching, categorizing and collating. While we do not intend to include every word Scalia has penned in the United States Reports, we intend to include all such writings which add substantively to an understanding of Scalia's jurisprudence and writing style (for example, we decline to index his five-line concurrence in Houston v. Hill, 482 U.S. 451, 472 (1987), explaining no more than why he was joining Justice Powell's dissent in part only).

We intend to achieve this goal by:

• Indexing all cases in which Justice Scalia has written an opinion (see Cases);
• Archiving transcripts of speeches given by Justice Scalia (see Speeches);
• Making available essays by Justice Scalia which are not otherwise available without Lexis subscriptions;
• Providing an easy method by which to search these materials for keywords and topics, and eventually, a full concordance of all archived speeches, opinions and essays.

How we're doing and how you can help

• We are currently building the index of cases; as you can imagine, this is a lengthy process. If you are interested in helping us complete this index, please contact us.
• Once that index is complete, we need to provide some method by which cases can be "ranked" to differentiate between "must-read" and what counts, by Scalia's standards, as "also-ran". This is something that all visitors will be able to help with - just not yet.
• We are only human. Mistakes happen; even Our Hero makes mistakes: see, e.g. Scalia, Law & Language, 157 First Things 37 (referring to the case "Erie R.R. v. Tomkins in 1939"; he means Erie R.R. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938)). Inevitably, with several hundred cases in the database, the law of averages dictates we must have gotten at least one citation wrong, or misspelled a litigant's name, or accidentally placed a case in the year of 1997 (when we meant to put it in OT 1997, therefore mostly likely being decided in 1998). Please report errors to us for correction.
• If you have written articles about Justice Scalia, or if you have transcripts of speeches we have not yet made available, please let us know, and we will try to reproduce or link to those items.
• Our long-range goals include a research project to include in Ninoville the Ninograms (short internal circulations by Scalia discussing his views on cases before the court) archived by the Library of Congress in the papers of Justices Marshall and Blackmun. If you are interested in helping us with this project, and live in the D.C. area, please let us know.
• Our long-range goals also include a research project to include in Ninoville's archive transcripts of oral arguments in which Justice Scalia has spoken (which is to say, approximately a hundred cases a year for eighteen years); this part of the project is so far into the strategic realm that it's beyond serious consideration, given the sheer overwhelming volume of material to collate; we mention it here only to point out that we are taking the entirety of the available material into consideration, and to make the point that we appreciate his direct and forthright style as much as his intellect and writing.
• Lastly, let us know what we haven't thought of. If you think our mission is lacking in some detail, let us know! If you can think of some way we could better achieve those goals, let us know!