40 | w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m OCTOBER 30 , 2017the justice on how many grandchildren he
had or show him hostile clips from The
Daily Show; in an earlier interview, just
prior to Scalia’s nomination to the Su -
preme Court, Scalia addressed his inter-
locutor, for comic effect, as “Mr. Lamb.”
Now, however—having been seated on
the Court for 22 years, destined to serve
seven more before dying in his sleep, dur-
ing a Texas hunting trip, in 2016—Scalia
answered earnestly. “I’ve thought about
doing a book on textual interpretation,”
he said, which thought flowered, the
following year, into Reading Law: The
Interpretation of Legal Texts, also co-
authored with Garner. But the first project
he mentioned was something else: “I’ve
toyed with the idea of doing a book just of
prior publications and prior speeches that
I’ve given, some of which I really am
quite fond of, and the speeches have never
been published.”
Now it’s here. Edited by Ed Whelan,
the former Scalia clerk who is president of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and
Christopher J. Scalia, the second-youngest
of the justice’s nine children, and featur-
ing a foreword by Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, Scalia Speaksis engrossing and
invaluable, a treasure for lawyers and non-
lawyers alike, a milestone in the literature
of this profoundly influential American
and in the annals of the Supreme Court.
Organized thematically, the 48
entries include speeches, commence-
ment addresses, and eulogies spanning
from 1984 to 2016. Whelan’s introducto-
ry notes draw on his own recollections
(“My last memory of Justice Scalia... is
seeing him on his knees in prayer in the
chapel’s choir stalls”), while Christopher
Scalia’s introduction, explaining how his
father crafted speeches, presents a touch-
ing farewell from a son who wishes he
had accepted that last invitation to a cigar.
Written in the Scalia style—learned
but streetwise, powerfully argumentative
yet seductively commonsensical—Scalia
Speaks is the closest thing to an autobiog-
raphy we will get from this jurist and
writer of supreme intellectual and literary
gifts. Before audiences of high-schoolers
and turkey-hunters, the justice mixed his
powers of suasion with anecdotes from
his Queens youth to educate and enlight-
en, celebrate and lament, poke and prod.“I will probably be telling you some stuff
you do not want to hear,” he cautioned
Congress’s Tea Party Caucus in a 2011
event open to all House members. “That
is part of my charm.”
But only part of it. Scalia was a man on
a mission—in fact, several: to be a dutiful
son of Christ and faithful executor of his
federal oath; to argue and write in ways
that entertained without subjecting the
English language, badly eroded by the
millennium, to further degradation; to
remind his listeners of a time in Ameri -
can society, not long ago, when children
freely played outside (“No adult supervi-
sion. No conceivable financial liability”)
and all schools, not just military acade-
mies, emphasized the formation of moral
character; and to advance textualism,
Scalia’s philosophy of how judges should
interpret statutes and the Constitution.
This last objective forms the bulk of
the book and brings the largest measure
of repetition, something Whelan and
Christopher Scalia acknowledge they
retained to show how frequently the jus-
tice evangelized on selected subjects.
Textualism holds that judges should exalt
the meaning a law was widely under-
stood to have when it was adopted, rather
than graft onto statutes the judges’ own
policy predilections, shaped by succeed-
ing generations or intellectual fads.
Making that point, as Scalia did tire-
lessly, invariably led him to the Founders
and the genius of the federal government
they devised. Indeed, among the revela-
tions here, especially for non-lawyers, is
the justice’s reminder that it is not the Bill
of Rights that guarantees Americans’
freedoms. “It is the beginning of wisdom
in this area to acknowledge that the
Constitution says what it says,” Scalia told
students of New York’s Juilliard School
for the performing arts in 2005. “And the
fullness of wisdom is to recognize that
the crowning achievement of America is
not the Bill of Rights (every modern
banana republic has one) but rather the
structure of government and the demo -
cratic tradition that make a Bill of Rights
enforceable according to its terms.”
Scalia’s piety happily coexisted
along side his ebullient and gregarious
personality—he considered, as a high-
school senior, pursuing the priesthood—‘I
Fthis turns out to be some-
thing you enjoy doing,”
C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb
asked Supreme Court jus-
tice Antonin Scalia, “what would anoth-
er book you’d like to write be?”
It was May 2008, and the justice was
promoting Making Your Case: The Art
of Persuading Judges, a legal-advice
manual he co-authored with Bryan
Garner. Interviewer and interviewee had
known each other since 1971, when
Scalia and Lamb worked in the White
House Office of Telecommunications
Policy. Ever since, they had been lunch-
ing near-quarterly on anchovy pizza and
cheap red wine at Scalia’s haunt, the
now-long-gone A.V. Ristorante on New
York Avenue in Washington, D.C.
On the surface, the C-SPAN encounter
appeared as simply yet another installment
in Lamb’s storied career as a gentle but
probing interviewer of historical and lit-
erary figures; to the knowing eye, he and
Scalia were ceaselessly taking the mickey
out of each other. Lamb would pop-quizScalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life
Well Lived, by Antonin Scalia, edited by
Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan
(Crown Forum, 432 pp., $30)Mr. Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent for
Fox News and the editor of the New York Times
bestseller A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the
Twentieth Century, by William F. Buckley Jr. He
is at work on a biography of Justice Scalia.Books, Arts &Manners
The Man
In Full
JAMES ROSENText