A justice alone, even if surrounded

SCALIA: A COURT OF ONE
Bruce Allen Murphy
Simon & Schuster; 644 pages; $35

Last fall the pugilistic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave an interview to Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine so playful and revealing that the transcript could nearly be made into a stage play and movie, in the manner of Frost/Nixon.

Justice Scalia, 78, and Ms Senior, 44, faced off across a generational, political and religious chasm. The most memorable moment was probably when Justice Scalia began speaking about how Satan operates in the modern world.

When Ms Senior widened her eyes, he pounced. "You're looking at me as though I'm weird," he said. "My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It's in the Gospels!" He added about her stare: "I was offended by that. I really was."

This moment captures the man we meet in Bruce Allen Murphy's sweeping new intellectual biography, Scalia: A Court of One, in pea-size form. That is to say, Mr Murphy delivers to us a man driven by three fundamental and nearly operatic qualities: a deep delight in argument, a florid and highly traditional Roman Catholicism and an insatiable need for attention to be paid.

These qualities have made Justice Scalia an unusually divisive Supreme Court justice. Once upon a time, justices didn't give interviews like this one. They remained above the fray, stoic referees rather than agitated players. The Devil? They found him mostly in the details.

Mr Murphy is a professor of history at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the author of three previous books about Supreme Court justices. His biography of Justice Scalia is patient and thorough, alive both intellectually and morally, and written in fluid, unshowy prose.

Mr Murphy is impressed by Justice Scalia - the wit and erudition behind his bushy eyebrows. He is less impressed by Justice Scalia's jurisprudence, which he finds to be nakedly partisan and overly informed by religious stricture, nearly to the extent that the justice would have us live in a theocracy. "Be fools for Christ," Justice Scalia told a religious audience in 2005. "And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world."

Mr Murphy also finds his subject to be perversely ineffectual. By alienating even the other conservatives on the court with his bullying tone and withering dissents, Mr Murphy says, Justice Scalia has frittered away opportunities to wield genuine influence by building consensus. He has become, as this book's title has it, a solo artist, a court of one.

Mr Murphy's book does not read like a book-length put-down. It's a sensitive and scholarly reading of Justice Scalia's intellectual life, based on archival research rather than on extensive interviews (Justice Scalia did not speak to the author, except in passing), and an account of the development of his "originalism" theory: that we should view the Constitution not as a living document but by closely attending to the language of the framers.

This book is more about the mind than about the man. It's most impressive for the manner in which the author takes us through case after case, sometimes stretching our patience but illuminating every twitch of Justice Scalia's synapses.

Justice Scalia, known as Nino, was born in Trenton in 1936. He went to grade school and Jesuit high school in New York City after his parents moved to Queens. His father, who arrived at Ellis Island from Sicily in 1920, got a graduate degree from Columbia and became a respected translator, biographer and professor. A pampered only child, Justice Scalia was a brilliant student who went to Georgetown, where he anchored the university's champion debate team, and then Harvard Law School, where he was the only conservative on the Law Review.

He worked as a lawyer and in government (he became assistant attorney general under Richard M Nixon a few days before Nixon resigned) before Ronald Reagan named him to the Federal Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia in 1982. Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1986. Reagan was said to like the idea of nominating the first Italian-American to the court. Mr Murphy finds it worth noting that Justice Scalia, who argued so often against affirmative action, "now became a de facto affirmative action choice for the Supreme Court".

Once on the court, Justice Scalia made his rumbling presence felt immediately. In one early case, he so monopolised the questioning that Lewis Powell leaned over and said to Thurgood Marshall, "Do you think he knows that the rest of us are here?"

Scalia: A Court of One peaks with a sustained and gripping account of the court's role in the 2000 presidential election. Justice Scalia's arguments in favour of stopping the manual recounting of votes, and thus handing the election to George W Bush over Al Gore, the author argues, "had nothing to do with originalism or any other reading of the Constitution, but rather it had everything to do with his evaluation of the raw politics of the situation".

After Chief Justice William H Rehnquist died in office in 2005, Mr Bush passed over Justice Scalia in favour of the younger John Roberts, a jurist more likely to seek compromise. Mr Murphy notes that Justice Scalia seems liberated now, more politically outspoken, less likely to recuse himself from cases where he might have a perceived conflict of interest.

One of the surprises of Ms Senior's interview was how cocooned Justice Scalia seems. He gets his news mostly from conservative media outlets; despite having the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a close friend, he rarely mingles with those who don't share his world view. This sense of a man alone and out of time lingers over Scalia: A Court of One. He certainly won't willingly retire while Barack Obama is in office, but if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2016, he may not wish to hang on. For now, he likes to tell his critics, in a favourite laugh line: "Can't scare me. I have life tenure."

©2014 The New York Times News Service