The combative personality of conservative judicial firebrand Antonin Scalia comes through more clearly than his philosophy in this dense biography. USA Today
legal affairs reporter Biskupic (Sandra Day O'Connor
) notes Scalia's contemptuous chin-flicking at the media and relaxed attitude toward torture and other controversies, but focuses on his Supreme Court tenure through a thematic survey of prominent cases. What fitfully emerges, apart from a man “confident in his views, hot in his rhetoric,” is his hostility to affirmative action, abortion rights and the “ 'homosexual agenda' ” and a fondness for states' rights, executive branch authority and gun-owners' rights, all justified by an “originalist” interpretation that hews to the bare text of the Constitution as its authors allegedly understood it. Biskupic's critical approach highlights inconsistencies in Scalia's reasoning, particularly when he went against his usual states' rights position in the Bush
v. Gore
decision, which settled the 2000 presidential election. But the complex, murky vagaries of Supreme Court case law are not the best format for elucidating a judicial philosophy; Biskupic gives a full account of this influential figure's doctrinaire conservatism, but the originalist doctrine itself is harder to discern. 8 pages of b&w illus. (Nov.)
