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A dissent, Antonin Scalia once said, “is never a winner.” That’s a revealing line, not because Scalia disliked dissenting—no justice in modern memory did more to make dissent an art form—but because it reminds us how much of his Supreme Court career consisted of losing beautifully, usefully, and, in the end, not quite permanently.
James Rosen’s Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986–2001, the second installment of a projected three-volume biography, is thus largely not the story of Scalia triumphant but of Scalia frustrated: by colleagues who wouldn’t argue, conservatives who wouldn’t conserve, friends who wouldn’t follow, reporters who wouldn’t understand, and precedents that wouldn’t die. The first volume—which I also reviewed in these pages (“Nino the Great,” Fall 2023)—carried Nino from Queens to the Marble Temple. Volume two shows what happened when he got inside and discovered that the place was not, in fact, a seminar room.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Claremont Review of Books (Paywall)
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.