James Rosen

They voted on the text of a law, and that text doesn't change, and its meaning doesn't change.

By the time Scalia died...

in his 30th term on the court, and we're coming up on the 10th anniversary, February 13, since Antonin Scalia left us.

No less a figure than Justice Elena Kagan, an appointee of President Obama, pronounced, because of the Scalia revolution in the law, we are all originalists now.

It was the clarity of the philosophy itself, the idea that the words have meaning and that meaning doesn't change just because some judge decided the meaning should change.

So that was very attractive.

And of course, Scalia helped found the Federalist Society, which grew enormously over time and popularized the idea of originalism.

You mentioned textualism.

It's important that people understand what these concepts are.

As I explain in these books, textualism is kind of the metal detector

that is used to divine the original meaning of the text.

And so you pay close attention to text.

If the text is ambiguous, and many laws have clauses and sentences that are ambiguous, that leave us scratching our heads as to what they mean, then Scalia decided that the next feature of originalism to divine the original meaning of a law

would be that you would have to look at historical traditions and to look at whether there is a long tradition on behalf of something, even if the law is ambiguous.

That was his argument against abortion.

And Professor Scalia was arguing against Roe v. Wade as early as the 1970s on PBS.

And in essence, there was no

There was nothing in the Constitution that mentioned abortion, and there was no historical tradition that protected abortion, quite the contrary.

I interviewed Justice Alito for this project, and in addition to the New York Times story that you mentioned, next week in Politico, I'm going to have an op-ed that is based off the interview I did with Justice Alito in Chambers.

We talked about the Dobbs opinion, which of course overturned Roe v. Wade, and I asked him, is there a direct line