James Rosen
speaker
716 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 27 Jun
James Rosen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 5.
Appearances
and in looking at the 1977 law chief justice roberts noted that it didn't contain the word tariffs which is another way for example that conservative judges and justices uh look upon abortion it's not mentioned in the in the constitution right so uh and furthermore uh roberts said that the the law actually states from 1977 only that the president may in times of declared emergencies
quote, regulate importations.
So Roberts distinguished even breaking out the Black's Law Dictionary, which was another favorite trick of Scalia's.
I shouldn't say it's a trick, but a means of statutory construction, a tool of statutory construction.
That's how closely we were looking at text and language.
Roberts busted out Black's Law Dictionary to distinguish between a regulation
which is what the 77 law talked about, and a tax, very different, which a tariff, of course, is a tax on imported goods.
So in that textualist mold, one can see right there Justice Scalia's imprimatur.
And the fact that the ruling went against a conservative president would also have been something that would have been Scalia in the sense that if you're really practicing originalism and textualism, sometimes the results will come up in a way that displeased the honest judge.
But that's how you know you have an honest judge.
In a word, through the force of personality of Antonin Scalia.
When Scalia became a federal judge in 1982, President Reagan appointed him to the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals, one rung below the Supreme Court, where his colleagues at that time included Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Robert Bork and Kenneth Starr, a real murderer's row of judicial talent.
They prevailed in the law in the early 80s.
in American law, a liberal notion called the Living Constitution.
This is the idea that judges today should be able to expand the meaning of the Constitution or any law enacted since then to account for phenomena that the founding fathers could never have anticipated, such as the internet or nuclear weapons.
Scalia stood athwart all that.
The Constitution is neither living nor dead, he would say.
It is an enduring legal text.
Words have meaning and they don't change over time.
Showing 281–300 of 716 · page 15 of 36
← Previous
Next →