Antonin Scalia’s judicial legacy has flourished far beyond what anyone might have reasonably imagined at the time of his death ten years ago. By keeping his Supreme Court seat open through the 2016 presidential election, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell provided conservatives wary of Donald Trump with a compelling reason to support him—a decision that ultimately secured Trump’s narrow victory in an otherwise precarious race. Trump subsequently appointed three justices who were admirers of Scalia and established the first conservative majority on the Court in nearly a century.
On case after case—most notably its 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade—the Court transformed Scalia’s dissents into binding majority opinions. More broadly, it adopted his principle of interpreting constitutional provisions according to their meaning at enactment and consistently upheld his textualist approach to statutory interpretation.
Amid this success, the profound distress Scalia endured during his own tenure as a justice remains easily overlooked. James Rosen’s meticulously researched second volume of his landmark biography illuminates this reality, reminding readers how far the Court has advanced—yet also the deep chasm that existed between Scalia’s vision and its operational reality.
When Warren Burger concluded his 17-year chief justiceship in 1986, the Court featured its oldest set of five justices ever: Burger at age 79, with four colleagues ranging from 80 to 77. Only Sandra Day O’Connor, Reagan’s first appointee, was younger than 60. Upon Reagan’s elevation of William Rehnquist as chief justice, he appointed Scalia—then just 50—to the associate position Rehnquist had held. Scalia quickly became dismayed by the Court’s intellectual stagnation: justices asked few questions during oral arguments, avoided deep discussion at conferences, showed little interest in crafting robust opinions, and largely operated in isolation.
Scalia cherished the vibrant collegiality of the D.C. Circuit, where he regularly engaged with colleagues on complex legal issues and provided detailed feedback on draft opinions. The Supreme Court, by contrast, became “terrible” to him: “No one discusses the cases. All they do is vote, vote, vote!” He proposed a process requiring dissenting justices to circulate critiques before any majority opinion was finalized—ensuring thorough scrutiny—but his suggestion was dismissed.
Over Scalia’s first five years, Powell and both liberal icons Brennan and Marshall retired. Reagan and George H.W. Bush sought conservative replacements but secured only one significant conservative appointment: Clarence Thomas under Bush. The Court remained largely unchanged for 11 years after this shift.
Scalia faced repeated losses in early decisions. In his second year on the Court, he issued a scathing dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988), criticizing the majority’s ruling that Congress could authorize independent counsel to investigate executive officials. He later clashed with O’Connor over abortion jurisprudence, noting her refusal to reconsider Roe v. Wade—a stance that led to the 1992 Planned Parenthood decision reaffirming abortion rights under a narrow interpretation.
Scalia also dissented in landmark cases involving the Establishment Clause and psychological coercion, lamenting how Kennedy’s approach to public-school graduation ceremonies risked “reducing judicial scrutiny to the level of interior decorating.” By his third year on the Court, he noted: “Day by day, case by case, [the Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.”
Rosen’s account reveals Scalia’s deep commitment to rigorous debate and intellectual accountability—a philosophy that often strained relationships with colleagues. While Scalia reportedly cherished his friendship with O’Connor during her cancer recovery, he also alienated Brennan through ideological differences over legacy and jurisprudence.
The book concludes with Scalia’s pivotal role in Bush v. Gore (2000), a decision that temporarily secured him within the conservative bloc but ultimately foreshadowed his greatest challenge: Kennedy’s enduring influence as a swing vote for the next decade. Rosen’s work, grounded in exhaustive research and interviews, captures Scalia’s complex legacy—a justice who grappled with an institution he believed was increasingly detached from constitutional reality.