Justice Antonin Scalia, whose transformative legal theories, vivid writing, and outsized personality made him a leader of a conservative intellectual renaissance in his three decades on the Supreme Court, was found dead Saturday at a resort in West Texas, according to a statement from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. He was 79.

“He was an extraordinary individual and jurist, admired and treasured by his colleagues,’’ Roberts said. “His passing is a great loss to the court and the country he so loyally served.’’

The cause of death was not immediately released.

Justice Scalia began his service on the court as an outsider known for caustic dissents that alienated even potential allies. But his theories, initially viewed as idiosyncratic, gradually took hold, and not only on the right and not only in the courts.

He was, Judge Richard A. Posner wrote in The New Republic in 2011, “the most influential justice of the last quarter century.’’ He was a champion of originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation that seeks to apply the understanding of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution. In Justice Scalia’s hands, originalism generally led to outcomes that pleased political conservatives, but not always. His approach was also helpful to criminal defendants in cases involving sentencing and the cross-examination of witnesses.

Justice Scalia also disdained the use of legislative history — statements from members of Congress about the meaning and purposes of laws — in the judicial interpretation of statutes. He railed against vague laws that did not give potential defendants fair warning of what conduct was criminal. He preferred bright-line rules to legal balancing tests, and he was sharply critical of Supreme Court opinions that did not provide lower courts and litigants with clear guidance.

All of these views took shape in dissents. Over time, they came to influence and in many cases dominate the debate at the Supreme Court, in lower courts, among lawyers, and in the legal academy.

By the time he wrote his most important majority opinion, finding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, even the dissenters were engaged in trying to determine the original meaning of the Constitution, the approach he had championed.

That 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, also illustrated a second point: Justice Scalia in his later years was willing to bend a little to attract votes from his colleagues. In Heller, the price of commanding a majority appeared to be including a passage limiting the practical impact of the decision.

With the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens in 2010, Justice Scalia became the longest serving member of the current court. By then, he was routinely writing for the majority in the major cases, including ones on the First Amendment, class actions, and arbitration.

He was an exceptional stylist who labored over his opinions and took pleasure in finding precisely the right word or phrase. In dissent, he took no prisoners. The author of a majority opinion could be confident that a Scalia dissent would not overlook any shortcomings.

Justice Scalia wrote for a broader audience than most of his colleagues. His opinions were read by lawyers and civilians for pleasure and instruction.

At oral argument, he took professorial delight in sparring with the advocates before him. He seemed to play to the crowd in the courtroom, which often rewarded his jokes with laughter.

Justice Scalia was a man of varied tastes, with a fondness for poker, opera, and hunting. His friends called him Nino, and they said he enjoyed nothing more than a good joke at his own expense.

He seldom agreed with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the important questions that reached the court, but the two for years celebrated New Year’s Eve together. Not long after Justice Elena Kagan, another liberal, joined the court, Justice Scalia took her skeet shooting.

Antonin Gregory Scalia was born on March 11, 1936, in Trenton, N.J., to Salvatore Scalia and the former Catherine Panaro.

Justice Scalia and his wife, the former Maureen McCarthy, had nine children, the upshot of what he called Vatican roulette. “We were both devout Catholics,’’ he told Joan Biskupic for her 2009 biography, “American Original.’’ “And being a devout Catholic means you have children when God gives them to you, and you raise them.’’ He said his large family influenced his legal philosophy.

“Parents know that children will accept quite readily all sorts of arbitrary substantive dispositions — no television in the afternoon, or no television in the evening, or even no television at all,’’ he said at a Harvard lecture in 1989. “But try to let one brother or sister watch television when the others do not, and you will feel the fury of the fundamental sense of justice unleashed.’’

Young Antonin was an exceptional student, graduating as valedictorian from Xavier High School in Lower Manhattan, first in his class at Georgetown and magna cum laude at Harvard Law School.

He practiced law for six years in Cleveland before accepting a position teaching law at the University of Virginia in 1967. Four years later, he entered government service, first as general counsel of the Office of Telecommunications Policy and then as chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an executive branch agency that advises federal regulators. Both positions drew on and expanded his expertise in administrative law, a topic that would interest him throughout his career.

In 1974, President Richard M. Nixon nominated him to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, an elite unit of the Justice Department that advises the executive branch on the law. He was confirmed by the Senate on August 22, 1974, not long after Nixon resigned.

In 1977, he returned to the legal academy, now joining the law faculty at the University of Chicago. He also served as editor of Regulation magazine, published by the American Enterprise Institute.

After Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Justice Scalia was interviewed for but did not get a job he coveted, solicitor general of the United States, the lawyer who represents the federal government in the Supreme Court.

He was later offered a seat on the federal appeals court in Chicago. But he turned it down in the hope of being nominated instead to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whose docket, location and prestige appealed to him. The court was also widely viewed as a steppingstone to the Supreme Court

The first D.C. Circuit opening in the Reagan years went to another prominent conservative law professor, Robert H. Bork. But the second one, in 1982, went to Justice Scalia.

He served for four years, issuing opinions favoring executive power and skeptical of claims of employment discrimination. The opinions, which were forceful and sometimes funny, attracted the attention of the White House.

He appeared to enjoy intellectual give and take from the bench, with his colleagues and in his chambers. On the appeals court and in his early years on the Supreme Court, he would hire one liberal law clerk each year to keep discussions lively.

“He made it a point of telling me that I was his token liberal,’’ said E. Joshua Rosenkranz, a law clerk for Justice Scalia in 1986, his last year on the appeals court. “To his credit, I’m sure it was largely because he wanted to be sure he always heard the arguments against the positions he was taking.’’

In 1986, after Chief Justice Warren Burger announced his intention to retire, Reagan nominated Justice Scalia to the Supreme Court. Though his conservative views were well known, he was confirmed by the Senate by a 98-0 vote. He may have benefited from the fact that the liberal opposition was focused on the nomination of Justice William H. Rehnquist, who was already on the court, to succeed Burger.

The lopsided vote for Justice Scalia reflected a different era, one in which presidents were thought to have wide latitude in naming judges. That era seemed to come to an end in 1987, with the defeat of the nomination of Bork.

In 1993, at the confirmation hearing for Ginsburg, Senator Joe Biden, who was then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said “the vote that I most regret of all 15,000 votes I have cast as a senator’’ was “to confirm Judge Scalia’’ — “because he was so effective.’’

Three days before the court handed the presidency to George W. Bush in December 2000, in Bush v. Gore, the court shut down the recount of votes in Florida in an unsigned opinion over the dissents of the four more liberal justices. Scalia felt compelled to respond in a concurrence.

“The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to’’ Bush “and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election,’’ Justice Scalia wrote.

He would later say privately that his brief concurrence doomed his chances of being named chief justice. He was often asked about the decision at public appearances. His stock response: “Get over it.’’

The centerpiece of Justice Scalia’s judicial philosophy was his commitment to the doctrine of originalism, which sought to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time of its adoption. That made him uncomfortable with some of the Supreme Court’s most important precedents.

“We have now determined,’’ he said in 2004, “that liberties exist under the federal Constitution — the right to abortion, the right to homosexual sodomy — which were so little rooted in the traditions of the American people that they were criminal for 200 years.’’

Justice Scalia said that some of the court’s leading decisions could not be justified under the original understanding of the Constitution. The court was wrong in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963, he said, to require the government to provide lawyers to poor people accused of serious crimes. It was wrong in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, he said, to say the First Amendment requires libel plaintiffs to meet heightened standards.

Justice Scalia also appeared to have reservations about Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregation in public schools as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. Brown, decided in 1954, is widely considered the towering achievement of the court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

But for originalists, the Brown decision is problematic. The weight of the historical evidence is that the people who drafted, proposed, and ratified the 14th Amendment from 1866 to 1868 did not believe themselves to be doing away with segregated schools.

In other settings, Justice Scalia took pains to say that he would not follow his theory wherever it would take him. He was, he said, “a faint-hearted originalist.’’

“I am a textualist,’’ he said. “I am an originalist. I am not a nut.’’

In a C-Span interview in 2009, Justice Scalia reflected on his role and legacy, sketching out a modest conception of the role of a Supreme Court justice.

“We don’t sit here to make the law, to decide who ought to win,’’ he said. “We decide who wins under the law that the people have adopted. And very often, if you’re a good judge, you don’t really like the result you’re reaching.’’