James Rosen

Antonin Scalia was not only the most frequent questioner on his time on the court, but also the most frequently the one to produce laughter.

And you can listen to those recordings of these oral arguments, even in Bush v. Gore.

And the laughter that Scalia produces, it's like comedy club laughter.

It's not polite laughter, as you might see at a congressional hearing.

It's like explosive laughing and clapping that goes on for 10 seconds.

And just like a pro, he would know to wait

and then start in with his additional questioning.

So he was seen as a kind of a bull in the china shop, but the truth is he was pressing upon his colleagues, people like Sandra Day O'Connor, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, these are some hallowed names,

He was, in essence, pressing them, hey, tighten up your act, okay?

You are not obeying the law.

You are not actually interpreting the law according to what the text says.

You're doing crazy things like saying, like, a 1976 law was actually preempted by an earlier law, like crazy rulings, and he stood athwart all that.

And this book, Scalia, Supreme Court Years 1986 to 2001, has all of the memos back and forth between Scalia and the other justices, their personal letters, which sometimes got snippy.

At one point, Scalia declares to Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, who did not like Scalia, I am hurt, Scalia wrote to him at one point, I am hurt that you would accuse me of X, Y, and Z. So there's a lot of human drama here, as well as the law and as well as shaping of American society.

This book is written for non-lawyers.

Reading it myself, I'm telling you, I crack up all the time at Scalia and his antics and his brilliance and his wit.

If you want to know how we got to modern America, and if you want to know about the life and thinking of one of our greatest patriots and really one of our greatest literary stylists, you're going to read this book, Scalia, Supreme Court Years, 1986 to 2001.

Well, thank you, Steve.

One of my previous books, my first book, was called The Strong Man, John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, published by Doubleday in 2008.

And it told the story of Richard Nixon's law partner and his campaign manager in 1968 when he won, and the Attorney General of the United States, John Mitchell, who then went to prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up, the highest-ranking U.S.