James Rosen

When he started, there were no originalists or textualists on the Supreme Court.

By the time he died, even Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court Justice appointed by President Obama, had proclaimed, in essence, thanks to the Scalia revolution, we are all originalists now.

So when he was on the Court of Appeals, the judges ruled on cases in groups of three, and it was very intimate and collegial, and he could just waltz down the hall and kibitz with Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Abner Mikva or any of the people who had been appointed by Democrats.

It was all very collegial when he got to the Supreme Court.

He was made to understand by his robed colleagues that there would be no kibitzing in chambers, that there would be no give and take, no arguments about how they should rule in the conferences.

Rehnquist, as chief justice, as an associate justice, had labored under and chafed under these long-winded perorations by the Chief Justice Warren Burger.

And Rehnquist was determined when he became chief, we're going to run these conferences quick.

We're going to go around the table.

You're going to say how you're voting.

You give a couple of lines of explanation, and that's it.

And Scalia, who had been a professor, loved debate.

He loved getting into it.

His sons told me that if he should stumble into a room where they're watching a football game, even if he doesn't know the players or which teams are playing, if he got a sense of which team his sons were rooting for, he'd start animatedly rooting for the other team.

He just loved to mix it up like that.

But at the Supreme Court, he called it a locked vault.

That's the name of the chapter about his early days there.

And it took some getting used to.

And so like a mighty river redirected, he instead turned his energies to oral arguments, which is the only public setting of the Supreme Court's work where spectators are allowed in to watch the proceedings.

And he began dominating oral argument and producing riotous laughter in the Supreme Court.

Studies have been done and they show that far and away,