At Law & Liberty, I review James Rosen’s new biography of Justice Scalia. An excerpt:
In many ways, Scalia’s influence since his death has been greater than he enjoyed during his lifetime, when so many of his most memorable opinions were dissents. Trump’s pledge to fill Scalia’s seat with a conservative justice was critical to his narrow victory in 2016, and Trump largely remade the Court in Scalia’s image. The Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade last year—a result that Scalia failed to achieve in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and had probably given up hope for—is just the starkest of his posthumous victories and one in what may end up being a long line.
“History is written by the winners.” Or so goes the exaggerated saying that Scalia once ruefully recited to me. The genre of history known as biography is more often written about the winners. So it’s fitting and welcome that journalist James Rosen has published Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986, the very fine first volume of his projected two-volume biography of the great justice.
As Rosen’s subtitle indicates, this volume covers the first fifty years of Scalia’s life, from his birth in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1936 through his appointment to the Supreme Court in 1986. Rosen is covering ground that has been previously stomped on. Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic published a biography of Scalia (American Original) in 2009, and college professor Bruce Allen Murphy wrote another (Scalia: A Court of One) in 2014. But as Rosen observes bluntly and accurately, both of those biographies “were unabashed in their contempt for Scalia’s jurisprudence and conduct” (with especially comical consequences for Murphy). So there’s plenty of room for Rosen’s much more admiring survey.