James Rosen

This new book, out Tuesday, Scalia, Supreme Court Years 1986 to 2001, covers his first day as a justice all the way up through the national trauma of Bush v. Gore.

Bracing it was, Steve, for this reporter to realize that there sits today on the Supreme Court only one justice who sat on Bush v. Gore, and that is Clarence Thomas, who was interviewed for this project.

But you ask, why is it important?

And I'm really glad you asked.

Antonin Scalia is not just one of the most important Supreme Court justices in history.

He's one of the most important Americans of the last hundred years.

And it's because of the philosophy he brought to the business of being a judge.

When Scalia came along as a federal judge in the early 80s and then rose to the Supreme Court in 1986, confirmed by the United States Senate 98 to nothing,

which always bothered him, by the way.

Well into the 21st century, Scalia would be saying, let's just call it 100.

He was ticked off that two senators didn't vote.

But in any case, when he came along, there prevailed in America, and particularly in the law, this notion of a living constitution.

This is still taught to school children every day.

And the Living Constitution idea, which is subscribed to by liberals on the Supreme Court, the Living Constitution holds that the document, the Constitution itself, and indeed every law that's been enacted ever since the Constitution,

should be interpreted by judges which is their central business of interpreting the laws telling us what the law means in a way that allows the judge to expand the meaning of the constitution of a given clause or any law to in effect in effect alter the meaning to modify the meaning to graft their latter-day policy preferences onto the existing law

And the idea behind it is that this constitution should expand to cover phenomena that the founders never could have envisioned, such as nuclear weapons or the internet.

Scalia stood athwart all of that.

And Scalia believed in something called originalism.

And his idea was that he didn't care what the intent behind the Constitution was or the lawmakers' intent behind a given law was.

Their intent is embodied in the text that they voted up or down.