James Rosen

And if they voted it up and a president signed it into law, that's the intent.

The first place we should be looking in order to interpret a law is its text.

And that text carries a meaning, and not a meaning changed by latter-day judges, but the original meaning it was widely understood to have at the time it was enacted.

Well, you're very kind, Steve.

Thank you.

The short answer is I steal the time from my family.

And in the acknowledgement section to this book, I apologize to my wife and two sons for how much time this project has required me to be away from them.

It was never intended to be a three-volume book.

It was intended to be a concise biography, believe it or not.

But as you could tell from our first segment, Steve, I don't do anything concisely.

I did want to finish the discussion we were having before the break about why Scalia is such an important...

American in the history of this country.

It's because he persuaded through, mostly through dissents, but really through his brilliant writing, his genius, his affability, his literary gifts, his charm, his use of language, and mostly in dissent.

He wasn't frequently on the winning sides of cases, but he changed the way we draft the law

We argue the law and judges and justices decide the law.

When he came along, people were talking about the living constitution and how we need to expand its meaning to account for new phenomena and how we need to look to the intent behind the law, not just the text of the law,

We need to know what they meant, so we should look back at floor speeches on the House and Senate floor, and we should look at committee reports.

Scalia said no to all of that.

Nobody voted on a floor speech.

Nobody voted on a committee report.