James Rosen

I think Hadley is partly the reason why Scalia's youngest child, his daughter Meg Scalia Bryce, attended Amherst.

And Hadley will appear in Volume 3 of this book near the very end of the book, near the very end of the entire saga.

when I'll be returning once again to the subject of Scalia's deep Catholic faith, which I call the rocket fuel for his rise to greatness.

And there's an episode where the two of them were in church together, and Hadley was kneeling, and there was no sort of...

padded area along the pew for him to place his knees on and he he told me that Scalia observed this and passed a pillow along the pew for Hadley's use for his knees on the floor of that church and he he cited that story as as as embodying the kind of man Scalia was off the bench let's talk about the originalism uh the truth so to speak

So when Scalia came along as a federal judge on the Court of Appeals in 1982 and then was elevated by President Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1986, there prevailed in the law in this country a liberal notion called the living constitution.

This is the idea that when judges or justices...

interpret the Constitution and its meaning, the meaning of its text, that they should be able to do so quite broadly, even imbuing meanings that weren't there at the time, that it's a living, breathing document, the meaning of which should be allowed to expand in order to account for

Phenomena that the founding fathers never could have anticipated, such as podcasts or the nuclear weapons or the internet or what have you.

And in order to breathe this expanded meaning into the text, the living constitutionalist judges and justices were bypassing the text altogether to look for the intent behind the law.

And they found that through trawling through legislative history, what was said on the House and Senate floor in their speeches, what was said in committee reports leading up to the vote.

Scalia stood to thwart all of that.

His view was the job of the judge is to interpret the law according to the original meaning that that law or the Constitution enjoyed when it was enacted.

And no judges should be grafting their latter-day policy preferences onto those existing texts and how to find the original meaning of the law.

For this, Scalia employed textualism.

I like to say textualism was the metal detector that Scalia would use in order to discern the original meaning of a law.

really closely looking at the text, sometimes busting out dictionaries if needed.

These were lonely positions to hold when he came along.

But through the force of his personality, and not because he was on the winning side of cases so much on the Supreme Court, more often in dissent, but through his personality, his dazzling literary gifts, his use of language,

Scalia ushered in a kind of counter-revolution in this country.