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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2014
There are currently two biographies of Justice Scalia, each with its distinctive strengths and weaknesses. The first was Joan Biskupic's "American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia" (Sarah Crichton Books, 2009). Biskupic's book is well-written, balanced, and based on extensive personal interviews with Justice Scalia himself, his family, and colleagues. It is not particularly strong, however, on Scalia's early life, his judicial philosophy, and his intellectual contribution.
Murphy's biography is longer, more in-depth, and more extensively researched than Biskupic's, but is less readable and makes no pretense to be even-handed. Murphy, a political science professor at Lafayette College, specializes in hard-hitting exposes of Supreme Court Justices. His earlier biographies of Abe Fortas and William O. Douglas, though useful and well-researched, spared readers no tawdry details of their subjects' flawed characters. This book adopts a similar kind of "gotcha" approach.
Unlike Biskupic, Murphy conducted few personal interviews. Instead, he draws heavily on public sources and archival records. The result is a scholarly but somewhat plodding and relentlessly critical biography. It is really the tale of two Scalias. The first is Scalia the Golden Boy: the gregarious, straight-laced Italian immigrant's son, who finished first in his class in high school and Georgetown, graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard Law School, rose quickly in his early career as a corporate lawyer, law professor, and government official, raised a model family, stayed true to his faith and his principles, and seemed to do everything right. The second Scalia is of the Golden-Boy-Corrupted. As Murphy tells it, a far less attractive Scalia emerges when he gets a seat on the federal bench. He becomes nastier and more combative. His love of fame and money leads him to give provocative speeches, teach legal seminars in posh settings, and engage in other conduct that Murphy considers unbecoming of federal judges. He increasingly allows his conservative religious beliefs to influence his judicial decisions. His vitriolic personal attacks and rigid refusal to compromise make it impossible for him to build effective coalitions with his conservative judicial colleagues. As power goes to his head, his ethical standards loosen, and he refuses to recuse himself from cases in which his impartiality is clearly in question. Though he professes to practice judicial restraint and fidelity to the Constitution's original meaning, Scalia's decisions become increasingly political and result-driven. Finally, the ultimate low point: Bush v. Gore: Consumed by a desire to become Chief Justice and appalled at the prospect of a Gore presidency with all that would mean for the future of the country and the Court, Scalia betrays all of his professed judicial principles and hands the presidency to Bush in a brazen act of politics that was nothing short of a judicial coup d'etat.
Readers will of course differ on how much of this latter tale they want to buy in to. Having read Biskupic's more balanced account, I found Murphy's narrative to be selective, one-sided, and far too often based on speculation rather than hard evidence. Peering into Scalia's mind with his psychic X-ray powers, Murphy sees little but ambition, hypocrisy, duplicity, and conceit.
Besides being one-sided, Murphy's book is too long. Readers hoping above all to get a feel for Scalia the man (and his family) will be disappointed by Murphy's heavy focus on Scalia's public life, his constant preoccupation with controversy, and by his slow-paced year-by-year rundown of Supreme Court decisions.
Murphy's book is also surprisingly thin on Scalia's intellectual contributions. There is very little on the origins of Scalia's textualist approach to reading statutes and constitutional texts; how Scalia elaborates and defends that approach; and the impact of his textualist approach on legal scholarship and the nation's courts.
To his credit, Murphy's extensive research does bring out many new and interesting details about Scalia's life, particularly in his childhood, his career as a corporate lawyer in Cleveland, and his work in the Nixon and Ford administrations. This scholarly legwork gives the book real value despite the relentless and often unfair negativism.
Murphy's biography is longer, more in-depth, and more extensively researched than Biskupic's, but is less readable and makes no pretense to be even-handed. Murphy, a political science professor at Lafayette College, specializes in hard-hitting exposes of Supreme Court Justices. His earlier biographies of Abe Fortas and William O. Douglas, though useful and well-researched, spared readers no tawdry details of their subjects' flawed characters. This book adopts a similar kind of "gotcha" approach.
Unlike Biskupic, Murphy conducted few personal interviews. Instead, he draws heavily on public sources and archival records. The result is a scholarly but somewhat plodding and relentlessly critical biography. It is really the tale of two Scalias. The first is Scalia the Golden Boy: the gregarious, straight-laced Italian immigrant's son, who finished first in his class in high school and Georgetown, graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard Law School, rose quickly in his early career as a corporate lawyer, law professor, and government official, raised a model family, stayed true to his faith and his principles, and seemed to do everything right. The second Scalia is of the Golden-Boy-Corrupted. As Murphy tells it, a far less attractive Scalia emerges when he gets a seat on the federal bench. He becomes nastier and more combative. His love of fame and money leads him to give provocative speeches, teach legal seminars in posh settings, and engage in other conduct that Murphy considers unbecoming of federal judges. He increasingly allows his conservative religious beliefs to influence his judicial decisions. His vitriolic personal attacks and rigid refusal to compromise make it impossible for him to build effective coalitions with his conservative judicial colleagues. As power goes to his head, his ethical standards loosen, and he refuses to recuse himself from cases in which his impartiality is clearly in question. Though he professes to practice judicial restraint and fidelity to the Constitution's original meaning, Scalia's decisions become increasingly political and result-driven. Finally, the ultimate low point: Bush v. Gore: Consumed by a desire to become Chief Justice and appalled at the prospect of a Gore presidency with all that would mean for the future of the country and the Court, Scalia betrays all of his professed judicial principles and hands the presidency to Bush in a brazen act of politics that was nothing short of a judicial coup d'etat.
Readers will of course differ on how much of this latter tale they want to buy in to. Having read Biskupic's more balanced account, I found Murphy's narrative to be selective, one-sided, and far too often based on speculation rather than hard evidence. Peering into Scalia's mind with his psychic X-ray powers, Murphy sees little but ambition, hypocrisy, duplicity, and conceit.
Besides being one-sided, Murphy's book is too long. Readers hoping above all to get a feel for Scalia the man (and his family) will be disappointed by Murphy's heavy focus on Scalia's public life, his constant preoccupation with controversy, and by his slow-paced year-by-year rundown of Supreme Court decisions.
Murphy's book is also surprisingly thin on Scalia's intellectual contributions. There is very little on the origins of Scalia's textualist approach to reading statutes and constitutional texts; how Scalia elaborates and defends that approach; and the impact of his textualist approach on legal scholarship and the nation's courts.
To his credit, Murphy's extensive research does bring out many new and interesting details about Scalia's life, particularly in his childhood, his career as a corporate lawyer in Cleveland, and his work in the Nixon and Ford administrations. This scholarly legwork gives the book real value despite the relentless and often unfair negativism.
