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American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
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Product Description
The first full-scale biography of the Supreme Court’s most provocative—and influential—justice
If the U.S. Supreme Court teaches us anything, it is that almost everything is open to interpretation. Almost. But what’s inarguable is that, while the Court has witnessed a succession of larger-than-life jurists in its two-hundred-year-plus history, it has never seen the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Combative yet captivating, infuriating yet charming, the outspoken jurist remains a source of curiosity to observers across the political spectrum and on both sides of the ideological divide. And after nearly a quarter century on the bench, Scalia may be at the apex of his power. Agree with him or not, Scalia is “the justice who has had the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about the law,” as the Harvard law dean Elena Kagan, now U.S. Solicitor General, once put it.
Scalia electrifies audiences: to hear him speak is to remember him; to read his writing is to find his phrases permanently affixed in one’s mind. But for all his public grandstanding, Scalia has managed to elude biographers—until now. In American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the veteran Washington journalist Joan Biskupic presents for the first time a detailed portrait of this complicated figure and provides a comprehensive narrative that will engage Scalia’s adherents and critics alike. Drawing on her long tenure covering the Court, and on unprecedented access to the justice, Biskupic delves into the circumstances of his rise and the formation of his rigorous approach to the bench. Beginning with the influence of Scalia’s childhood in a first-generation Italian American home, American Original takes us through his formative years, his role in the Nixon-Ford administrations, and his trajectory through the Reagan revolution. Biskupic’s careful reporting culminates with the tumult of the contemporary Supreme Court—where it was and where it’s going, with Scalia helping to lead the charge.
Even as Democrats control the current executive and legislative branches, the judicial branch remains rooted in conservatism. President Obama will likely appoint several new justices to the Court—but it could be years before those appointees change the tenor of the law. With his keen mind, authoritarian bent, and contentious rhetorical style, Scalia is a distinct and persuasive presence, and his tenure is far from over. This new book shows us the man in power: his world, his journey, and the far-reaching consequences of the transformed legal landscape.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #3777 in Books
- Published on: 2009-11-10
- Released on: 2009-11-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 448 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780374202897
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The combative personality of conservative judicial firebrand Antonin Scalia comes through more clearly than his philosophy in this dense biography. USA Today legal affairs reporter Biskupic (Sandra Day O'Connor) notes Scalia's contemptuous chin-flicking at the media and relaxed attitude toward torture and other controversies, but focuses on his Supreme Court tenure through a thematic survey of prominent cases. What fitfully emerges, apart from a man confident in his views, hot in his rhetoric, is his hostility to affirmative action, abortion rights and the 'homosexual agenda' and a fondness for states' rights, executive branch authority and gun-owners' rights, all justified by an originalist interpretation that hews to the bare text of the Constitution as its authors allegedly understood it. Biskupic's critical approach highlights inconsistencies in Scalia's reasoning, particularly when he went against his usual states' rights position in the Bush v. Gore decision, which settled the 2000 presidential election. But the complex, murky vagaries of Supreme Court case law are not the best format for elucidating a judicial philosophy; Biskupic gives a full account of this influential figure's doctrinaire conservatism, but the originalist doctrine itself is harder to discern. 8 pages of b&w illus. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Joan Biskupic has done it again. Having hit a home run in her fine biography of the quintessential centrist justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, Biskupic has now hit it far out of the park with her elegant, insightful, and eminently readable account of the life and constitutional views of the most colorful justice on the Supreme Court’s right wing. For anyone who wants to understand the most influential and interesting voice of the most powerful movement in contemporary American law, this book is a must-read.” —Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard Law School
“Biskupic is an old-fashioned reporter’s reporter—hard-digging, tough-minded, but even-handed. She is also a thoughtful and shrewd judge of people. She has penetrated the Supreme Court and given us a fascinating portrait of the court’s most colorful and human justice.” —Evan Thomas, editor, Newsweek
“This is the best judicial biography I’ve ever read. Scalia, the lodestone of the modern Court, is complex, influential, difficult, and, above all—in these pages—alive.” —Richard Ben Cramer, author of Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life
About the Author
Joan Biskupic has covered the Supreme Court since 1989 and currently writes for USA Today. Previously the Supreme Court reporter for The Washington Post, she is a frequent panelist on PBS’s Washington Week. Biskupic holds a law degree from Georgetown University and previously authored a biography of Sandra Day O’Connor. Please visit her website at www.joanbiskupic.com.
Customer Reviews
Another Blockbuster Biography
American Original is the latest judicial biography by the insightful and talented Joan Biskupic. Having covered the Supreme Court for many years for The Washington Post and USA Today, Ms. Biskupic has honed her remarkable talent for understanding the people behind the robes. With a fluid and engaging style of writing, the author shows how the justices' personal lives impact their judicial decision making. After successfully publishing a biography of Justice Sandra Day O'Conner several years ago, Ms. Biskupic trains her sights on one of our most intriguing and provocative justices, Antonin Scalia. Reading American Original provides an in depth understanding of the life events that shaped Justice Scalia's vision of what the Constitution means and how it should be applied. Ms Biskupic's research is informed by numerous interviews with not only Justice Scalia and his family but virtually all of the sitting justices, a remarkable feat and a testament to the writer's investigative skills. Lest anyone be concerned that this biography is "soft" on Justice Scalia, Ms Biskupic offers a balanced and often critical analysis of the Justice's decisions. What stands out in American Original is the fullness of Justice Scalia's pesonality. You may not agree with his philosophy but he is a larger than life individual whose intellectual prowess and engaging manner make him a compelling character.
To better understand the long journey towards a more conservative Supreme Court, one must read American Original. While it may be known today as the "Roberts Court", it had its genesis from the commencement of Justice Scalia's tenure. American Original is a book that everyone, not just lawyers, should read to understand the impact of the Supreme Court in our lives.
Even-Handed & Illuminating
Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic has accomplished a commendable feat of narrative art: to present in an engaging yet even-handed tone the legal, political, and spiritual perspectives that inform the jurisprudence of the Court's most controversial member. Scalia has been the subject of numerous books and articles which alternately laud or condemn his influence on the Court. Biskupic eschews "taking sides" in any partisan way and offers up the closest thing we have to a measured account of Scalia's life and his approach to the law.
Particularly commendable about the book is the fact that Scalia is a sitting Justice. It's usually very difficult for an author to remain tonally impartial when she is writing a "history of the present." Yet Biskupic manages to do just that, even when considering such recent events as Scalia's duck-hunting trip with then-Vice President Dick Cheney and the 2009 New Haven firefighters case.
One way Biskupic manages this task is to cite responses to Scalia's public statements and/or opinions from a range of perspectives, "liberal" to "conservative." Another way is to highlight both the consistencies and inconsistencies with Scalia's professed "originalism." But much of the credit should go to Biskupic's own narrative style, which is the hallmark not of "objective" journalistic reporting but of measured historical analysis. Reading her book almost feels like assessing the career of a highly influential jurist from the past. That Scalia is a sitting Justice seems incidental to Biskupic's larger project of understanding his life and perspectives in rigorous historical context.
I highly recommend this book not only to students of law and the U.S. Supreme Court but also to anyone interested in civics, legal reasoning, and the art of biographical writing.
Another example of why journalists are excellent biographers
The sub-title "Life and Constitution" is quite fitting for this book, because about one-third of it addresses the life story of Justice Scalia, which sets the stage for the jurisprudence of Justice Scalia (particularly his originalist approach to constitutional interpretation and his expansive view of executive authority) that is addressed in the remaining two-thirds of this book. Recent books on Justice Scalia (such as Ralph Rossum's Text and Tradition and Kevin Ring's Scalia Dissents) focus entirely on Scalia's jurisprudence but with a focus limited to the political and historical context. So Biskupic's biographical context is long overdue.
The Prologue sets forth Biskupic's thesis (or critique, depending on your point of view) that Scalia's originalist approach is only used when necessary to achieve a desired ideological end but is conveniently discarded when it would lead to a result that is contrary to his conservative ideology. The Prologue cites as an example Scalia's contrasting conclusions in the 1995 Lopez decision (requiring the federal government to stay out of purely local issues such as banning guns in school zones) and the 2005 Raich decision (permitting the federal government to intervene in local issues such as legalization of medicinal marijuana). The final chapter suggests yet another more recent example, his 2008 decision in Heller, which interpreted the Second Amendment to confer an individual right to bear arms (this chapter also provides a biographical context with tales of Scalia's boyhood hunting days).
Biskupic's expository biography suggests that Scalia's father, a professor of Romance Languages, may have been an early (albeit unintended) influence on Scalia's originalism as a jurist - that is, examining the U.S. Constitution as it was originally written as opposed to as it should evolve through history. As a professor, Scalia's father transalted complex texts of classic literature, perhaps explaining Scalia's insistence on strict construction of the literal text and disregard for the legislative history that does not make its way to the final text.
As for Scalia's broad view of executive authority, Biskupic chronicles Scalia's tenure in the Nixon and Ford Administrations. Scalia was hired within months after the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, at which time executive authority was taken to its extreme. During the Ford Administration, Nixon's first assignment was write a legal opinion on the breadth of executive power in the context of whether the belatedly discovered Nixon tapes were property of the ex-President himself or property of the Federal Government (Scalia concluded the former and Congress rebuffed him a year later by enacting the Presidential Records Act). Regarding Scalia's seeming disdain for the legislative branch, Biskupic recounts Scalia's battle against Congress on behalf of the Ford Administration when various Senators the tried to hold then-Secretary of State Kissinger in contempt for failing to turn over sensitive covert information. During that time Scalia was also part of the vetting committee for the Supreme Court vacancy that was eventually filled by John Paul Stevens (which Biskupic suggests may have given Scalia some insight on how to position himself for a future vacancy). These biographical chapters give some context for the later chapters on Scalia's executive power jurisprudence, such as his opinion in the 2006 Hamden decision wherein he concluded that the President had the broad discretion to imprison enemy combatants.
The first half of the book contains detailed chapters on Scalia's tenure on the D.C. Circuit at a pivotal time during the Reagan administration when that Circuit went from extreme left to extreme right (Bork, Silberman, MacKinnon, etc.), his active role with American Enterprise Institute during the early days of the Reagan Revolution, and his instrumental role in founding the Federalist Society, all of which set the stage for his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986. Biskupic's chapter on Scalia's confirmation hearing is necessarily short given that it was so uneventful. Biskupic explains that it was so uneventful (or uncontroversial) because the left-leaning members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had just finished a futile crusade to derail Rehnquist's elevation to the seat of Chief Justice, and so they simply ran out of steam when it came time for Scalia's confirmation.
The second half of the book addresses the various areas of Scalia's jurisprudence, including religious freedom, race relations, gay rights, federalism, and executive privilege. Those chapters interweave segments of Scalia's biography to put his decisions in each of these areas in some personal (as well as jurisprudential) perspective. For example, Biskupic illustrates Scalia's strict Catholicism and disdain for Vatican II as an insightful context that explains Scalia's selective deference to the legislature on matters of religious freedom (for example, Scalia dissented in the Weisman decision that prohibited public school faculty from arranging school prayer at graduation but he was deferential to seemingly neutral state laws that may inhibit the free exercise of religion, such as the Lamb's Chapel case that allowed the government to deny unemployment insurance to employees who were fired for their religious use of peyote). These are just of a few examples of why this book is an enjoyable read for lawyers, historians, political scientists or any layman seeking a better understanding of what leads a Justice on the Supreme Court to make decisions that shape the course of history.
As a journalist, Biskupic has the skill of distilling the complexities of the issues that are decided by the Supreme Court, so that they may be understood by that average newspaper reader (in my view, this is what puts Biskupic in the category with former New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse). One caveat about Biskupic's journalist mindset is that she cannot seem to resist attacking Scalia for his rocky relationship with the press, which takes away (somewhat) from the objectivity of this book (though, in fairness, Biskupic does paint a humanized and flattering picture of Scalia in many parts of this book). Next week I will get to meet Biskupic in person when she comes to Philadelphia's National Constitution Center to discuss this book. I hope to ask her if she struggled to suppress her journalistic biases when completing this book.
