James Rosen

And while that might be painful for the alleged victim, nonetheless, that's what justice requires.

That's one example.

And that's not just political history.

The way Scalia became so important, the reason I'm writing these books, the reason Americans have to know about Antonin Scalia...

Why he's one of the most important Americans of the last hundred years is because of the judicial philosophy he brought to his job.

The central business of being a judge is that you interpret the laws.

You tell us what the laws mean.

And when Scalia came along as a judge originally on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where he sat with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that's where their famous friendship began.

where he sat with Robert Bork and Kenneth Starr and Larry Silberman and James L. Buckley, just an incredible array of talent on that court.

When he came along as a judge and then a justice, there prevailed in the American law a liberal notion called the living constitution.

This is the idea that judges today should be free to interpret the constitution and any law passed since then in the broadest possible way, because they feel that this constitution, the constitution we have,

should be, its meaning should expand like a living, breathing organism or an accordion to account for things that the founders never could have contemplated, such as the internet or nuclear weapons.

Scalia stood athwart all that.

He said the intent of the lawmakers is

is what they passed up or down in the Congress and what a president of the United States signed, the text of the law.

And we shouldn't be looking beyond the text to go back into the legislative history of floor speeches and committee reports to find out what lawmakers intended.

We know what they intended.

It's the text of the law.

That was a profound revolution in the law, and it changed the way we write the laws in America, the way we argue them in courts, and the way the laws are ruled upon by judges and justices.

By the time he died,