WASHINGTON — Justice Antonin Scalia's body will lie in repose Friday in the Supreme Court's majestic Great Hall, not far from the courtroom where he dominated the court's arguments for three decades and helped shape U.S. law. His body was placed on the same catafalque, on loan from Congress, that once held President Abraham Lincoln's coffin.
Thousands of dignitaries, friends, local residents and tourists will pay their respects to Scalia, who was the current court's longest serving member when he died at 79 Saturday at a Texas ranch. As they file by, they will see a 2007 portrait of the justice by Nelson Shanks.
It has been 11 years since a member of the court, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, died while on the bench, and Friday's ceremonies are likely to be similar to those. When President George W. Bush came to the court to pay his respects to Rehnquist in 2005, he was accompanied by Scalia.
Scalia's coffin arrived in front of the court just before 9:30 a.m., and the current members of the court stood just inside the entrance to the Great Hall to greet it. Supreme Court police officers served as pallbearers, and some of Scalia's former law clerks served as honorary pallbearers.
A private ceremony in the Great Hall followed. The Rev. Paul Scalia, Justice Scalia's son, who is a Catholic priest, offered a prayer over his father's coffin.
The public was to be admitted later Friday morning. Former law clerks will serve as an honor guard until the visiting hours end at 8 p.m.
The court was closed for official business Friday, and the justices canceled a long-scheduled private conference at which they were to consider requests to hear appeals. The dynamic at such conferences will for now be different, and not only because Scalia was a lively and gregarious presence.
It takes four votes to add a case to the docket, and now there are only eight available.
What had been a four-member conservative bloc no longer has the unilateral power to grant review in a case. And the strategic calculations, generally involving an assessment of how Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was likely to vote, have shifted.
The funeral Mass for Scalia will be Saturday at 11 a.m. at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in northeast Washington. The court did not release information about the burial, saying only that it would be private.