American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

by Joan Biskupic

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374202893
• ISBN13: 9780374202897
• Release Date: November 2009
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 434 Pages
• Weight: 1.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

El Niño!

The dust jacket says that this is a "full-scale biography" of Justice Antonin ("Nino") Scalia. It is not a biography in the usual sense of the word. It is more like one of the "Highlights" videos that are regularly produced by NFL football teams. To be sure, there are some elements of biography. For example, we learn that Scalia's father was Italian, that he earned a Ph.D. and that he taught English in Brooklyn College. Also, we learn that the Scalias are Catholic, and that Nino was educated at a Jesuit-run high school and college. These biographical aspects of the book are important because the author frequently concludes that Justice Scalia's legal opinions can be traced back to the rigid rules of a father who taught languages, or to the legalistic beliefs held by Catholics - Jesuits in particular. Like a highlights video, the book is organized around interesting constitutional issues and cases rather than following a traditional chronological timeline. Frequently using excerpts from the written opinions of Justice Scalia, there are short summaries of cases dealing with discrimination and affirmative action, abortion, religion, gay rights, the Bush/Gore presidential election, the Guantanamo detainees, and other important matters that came before the Supreme Court in the last twenty-five years. By and large, the summaries are substantively excellent. They are very well written and highly entertaining. Scalia's feistiness and dominating sense of humor are clearly presented. Opposing views of some of Scalia's colleagues on the bench and law school professors are presented, usually in conclusional form, sometimes through the author's introductory or concluding clauses. It is like reading a series of inter-related short stories. You do not want to put the book down. The issue-oriented organization of the book does give rise to some difficulties, although those difficulties do not detract from the interesting narrative. For example, the book does not deal with the evolution of the Supreme Court, except insofar as it involves Scalia's contemporaries. The most senior of those contemporaries was Justice William Brennan. The Supreme Court was in existence 166 years before Justice Brennan was appointed, but no mention is made of the pattern of Court decisions during that span of time. Nor is there any mention that Brennan, who was only the second Catholic appointed to the Supreme Court during those 166 years, was exceedingly uncomfortable with the fact that his appointment was largely because he was a Catholic. (President Eisenhower was appealing to Catholic voters.) On the other hand, the book does mention the comment of Professor Stone, a former Brennan law clerk, that "All five justices in the majority [banning partial birth abortion] are Catholic." The implication is that the ruling was made on religious grounds. Finally, the reader gets no sense of the difficulty that must have been encountered by a person of average means who

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 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.

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 f