For those who are interested, Ed Warren Whelan has some comments on Joan Biskupic’s new book on Justice Scalia. Part I here and Part II here.
Ed’s conclusion:
My overall take on American Original is decidedly mixed. On the positive side: The book is well written, much more so than I expected from my occasional encounters with Biskupic’s reporting. It is also in many places more evenhanded than I expected. And I found the first four chapters particularly interesting.
I’ll flesh out the negative side in my posts to come, but here’s an overview: Consistent with her reductionist depiction of judging as politics, Biskupic does not engage well with Scalia’s ideas about judging. In particular, I doubt that any reader will come away from the book understanding what Scalia’s original-meaning methodology is, much less his stated reasons for believing that it’s the correct interpretive methodology. Far from grappling with Scalia’s jurisprudential ideas, Biskupic resorts to flawed and simplistic accounts. Worse, she misrepresents Scalia’s positions and statements on a variety of matters—always to his detriment. In sum, although she may well have, as she says (p. 415), “worked hard to be both fair to him and true to the readers of this book,” she has fallen well short of those goals.
Ed’s review reminds me again of why I so admired Jan Crawford Greenburg’s book Supreme Conflict–I was impressed by Greenburg’s effort to really understand conservative judicial philosophy and their effort to distinguish law from policy and politics. Some may criticize them as failing to live up to this purported goal, but I think that Greenburg’s sense of what animates the debates within the conservative legal movement is correct and that she does describe those debates fairly, even if she doesn’t agree with them (which, to her credit as a journalist, I had no idea after reading the book whether she was actually sympathetic or hostile to conservative legal theories).
Andrew Hyman says:
Ed Whalen, not Ed Warren.
November 18, 2009, 10:44 amJoe says:
From various accounts, I’m unsure how much Greenburg disagrees, including reading some of her own opinions, with the conservative p.o.v. Her overall analysis in that book left something to be desired, putting aside her understanding of the conservative mind.
November 18, 2009, 11:08 amp.d. says:
It’s little surprise that a reporter might misunderstand or misconstrue Scalia’s views on originalism. Even brilliant legal scholars confuse original meaning and original intent, and all too often fall back on the “dead white guys” criticism of originalism (the one that comes to mind is Jamal Greene’s recent writing on originalism).
November 18, 2009, 11:15 amCornellian says:
That reminds me I’ve been meaning to read that Greenburg book.
November 18, 2009, 10:29 pmneurodoc says:
Joan was a Georgetown classmate, working her day job as a reporter at the Washington Post while she pursued her JD in the evenings. I could never understand someone with a beat like hers (courts, not sports) going, as she subsequently did, from the WaPo to USA Today(?!), a newspaper which aims to be understandable to those who read at the 8th grade level. (Am I just being a snob here, is there more between the lines of USA Today than I appreciate? Admittedly, I rarely pay that publication much attention, so perhaps miss whatever substance is there.)
November 20, 2009, 2:24 amneurodoc says:
BTW, who are the foremost reporters covering our courts – Liptak, Greenburg, Totenberg, Lithwick, Biskupic… – and how do the cognoscenti think they stack up against one another?
November 20, 2009, 2:29 amMyrtle Beach Attorney says:
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December 2, 2009, 10:07 pmbest registry cleaner says:
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December 8, 2009, 10:53 am