MARFA, Texas — Inside the cloistered chambers of the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia’s days were highly regulated and predictable. He met with clerks, wrote opinions and appeared for arguments in the august courtroom on a schedule set months in advance.

Yet as details of his sudden death trickled in Sunday, it appeared that the hours afterward were anything but orderly. The man known for his elegant legal opinions and profound intellect was found dead in his room at a hunting resort by a ranch owner.

It then took hours for authorities in remote West Texas to find a justice of the peace, officials said Sunday. When they did, she pronounced Scalia dead of natural causes without seeing the body and decided not to order an autopsy. A second justice of the peace, who was called but couldn’t get to Scalia’s body in time, said she would have ordered an autopsy.

After emergency personnel and officials from the U.S. Marshals Service were called to the scene, two local judges who also serve as justices of the peace were called, Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara said in an interview Sunday. Both were out of town, she said – not unusual in a remote region where municipalities are spread far apart.

Guevara declined to comment further to The Post, but told a Dallas TV station that Scalia’s death certificate would list myocardial infarction – a heart attack – as the official cause of death.

– The Washington Post