Scalia Speaks [electronic resource] : Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived

Title:

Author:

Description:

-- Scalia Speaks will give readers the opportunity to encounter the legendary man more fully, helping them better understand the jurisprudence that made him one of the most important justices in the Court's history and introducing them to his broader insights on faith and life.

Publisher:

The Crown Publishing Group,

Date:

2017

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Summary

This definitive collection of beloved Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's finest speeches covers topics as varied as the law, faith, virtue, pastimes, and his heroes and friends. Featuring a foreword by longtime friend Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and an intimate introduction by his youngest son, this volume includes dozens of speeches, some deeply personal, that have never before been published. Christopher J. Scalia and the Justice's former law clerk Edward Whelan selected the speeches.

Americans have long been inspired by Justice Scalia's ideas, delighted by his wit, and instructed by his intelligence. He was a sought-after speaker at commencements, convocations, and events across the country. Scalia Speaks will give readers the opportunity to encounter the legendary man more fully, helping them better understand the jurisprudence that made him one of the most important justices in the Court's history and introducing them to his broader insights on faith and life.

Reviews (2)

New York Review of Books Review

WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World, $28.) After his best-selling "Between the World and Me," Coates could have cashed in with a standard miscellany. Instead, this master class in the essay charts his ascension as perhaps the important critic of our time. REVOLUTION SONG: A Story of American Freedom, by Russell Shorto. (Norton, $28.95.) George Washington is the hub of Shorto's book, which artfully weaves together the stories of six individuals from the Revolutionary period to give a sense of how far-reaching a phenomenon the War of Independence was. SCHLESINGER: The Imperial Historian, by Richard Aldous. (Norton, $25.95.) Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has found in Aldous an agreeably judicious biographer who gracefully balances an appreciation for his subject's talents as a writer of narratives and speeches with an acknowledgment of his shortcomings as a political analyst and aide. SMILE, by Roddy Doyle. (Viking, $25.) Doyle's 11th novel is the closest thing he's written to a psychological thriller: The protagonist's life goes off track after a stranger from his past shows up, reminding him of their Catholic school days amid signs of a deeper darkness the narrator refuses to confront. THE IMPOSSIBLE PRESIDENCY: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office, by Jeremi Suri. (Basic, $32.) A historian traces the changing role of the presidency from Washington onward, arguing that as the job has become increasingly complex it now involves more than a single person can handle. SCALIA SPEAKS: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, by Antonin Scalia. Edited by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan. (Crown Forum, $30.) This collection of speeches and writing by the famously argumentative Supreme Court justice, who died in February 2016, offers a clear picture of his originalist interpretation of the Constitution. THE THREE LIVES OF JAMES MADISON: Genius, Partisan, President, by Noah Feldman. (Random House, $35.) America's fourth president shifted his political orientation at least three times in his life. Feldman marks the changes in his nuanced portrait of the founding father. THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, by Fleur Jaeggy. Translated by Minna Zallmann Proctor. (New Directions, paper, $12.95.) A Swiss-Italian writer presents short impressionistic takes on Thomas De Quincey, John Keats and the French Symbolist Marcel Schwob. FRIENDS DIVIDED: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, by Gordon S. Wood. (Penguin Press, $35.) Wood traces the long, fraught ties between the second and third presidents, and sides almost reluctantly with Jefferson in their philosophical smack-down. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Library Journal Review

This fine representative assemblage of Supreme Court Justice Scalia's speeches pays tribute to his ready wit and facility with language. Assembled by Scalia's son Christopher, writer and erstwhile English professor, and his former law clerk Whelan (president, Ethics and Public Policy Ctr.), these selections from Scalia's voluminous addresses provide an excellent exploration of the late justice's favorite topics. Indeed, the book's subtitle captures its spirit, promising and delivering such reflections. Fans and opponents alike will benefit by immersing themselves in Scalia's entertaining, albeit at times infuriating, pronouncements. -Divided into six comprehensive sections: "On the American People and Ethnicity," "On Living and Learning," "On Faith," "On Law," "On Virtue and the Public Good," and "On Heroes and Friends," and with a foreword by Scalia's dear friend and jurisprudential nemesis Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this volume truly captures the man and his wide-ranging thought. Particularly recommended for interested law readers are the speeches "The Idea of the Constitution," "Original Meaning," "Interpreting the Constitution," and "Dissents." VERDICT Indispensable for Scalia aficionados, fans of Scalia's Court: A Legacy of Landmark Opinions and Dissents, edited by Kevin A. Ring, and anyone fascinated by this legendary jurist.-Lynne Maxwell, West Virginia Univ. Coll. of Law Lib., Morgantown © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

What Makes an American In October 1986--one month after he became the first Italian American to sit on the Supreme Court--Justice Scalia received the National Italian American Foundation's award for public service. In the course of explaining why he was proud of his Italian heritage, he drew a broader lesson about what makes an American. My fellow Italian Americans: I am happy to provide the occasion for this celebration of our common Italian ancestry. You do me great honor this evening--and it is an honor that by all rights I must share with many others. My parents and relatives, of course--my teachers (some of whom are here this evening)--all of those who have had an influence on my life. One debt I would like particularly to acknowledge is to the many Italian Americans in many fields of endeavor, but particularly in politics, who by their example of ability and integrity made it easy for someone with an Italian name to be considered for high office. Even the most successful of us are midgets standing on the shoulders of others--and I want to acknowledge my special indebtedness to the Peter Rodinos and Frank Annunzios and John Volpes who made my path an easy one. It is a great responsibility to be readily identifiable with a particular ethnic group. I am where I am in part because my predecessors bore that responsibility well. I hope to do the same. I want to say a few words this evening about why we are proud of our Italian heritage--and about why that pride makes us no less than 100 percent Americans. Three of the world's great civilizations flourished in the lands you and I came from. The southern part of Italy, Magna Grecia, was one of the most important parts of ancient Greece--and Syracuse was the largest city of that civilization. The Roman Empire began on the Italian peninsula and spread its influence throughout the Western world. And the Italian city-states of the Renaissance were the beginning of the modern world. We are also a race that has lived under many foreign rulers--the Normans, the Saracens, the French, the Spanish, and the Austrians. So we bear with us the knowledge, learned the hard way, how difficult it is to create a great society, and how easy it is, through foolish discord at home or failure to confront threats from abroad, to lose it. The Italian immigrants who came to this country possessed, it seems to me, four characteristics in a particularly high degree--characteristics that continue to be displayed, by and large, by their descendants. First, a capacity for hard work--whether on the lines of the railroads whose construction brought many of them here, or in the machine shops and garment factories of the industrial East, or in the fisheries and vineyards of California. They were successful in that work, as is evident from the fact that the last time I looked at the figures their descendants have the highest per capita income of any ethnic group (including Anglo-Saxons) except the Chinese and Japanese. Second, a love of family. The closeness of the Italian family is legendary--it is one of our great inheritances. Third, a love of the church. Italian American priests and Italian American parishioners have--with a good deal of help, it must be acknowledged, from our Irish co-religionists in the East and Hispanic Americans in the West--made Roman Catholicism one of the major religions in a country where it began as a tiny minority. And fourth, perhaps arising from the first three--the product of hard work, a secure family environment, and a confident knowledge of one's place within God's scheme of things--a love of the simple physical pleasures of human existence: good music, good food, and good--or even pretty good--wine. We have shared those qualities with our fellow Americans--as they have shared the particular strengths of their heritages with us. And the product is the diverse and yet strangely cohesive society called America. It is a remarkable but I think demonstrable phenomenon that our attachment to and affection for our particular heritage does not drive our society apart, but helps to bind it together. Like an intricate tapestry, the fabric of our society is made up of many different threads that run in different directions, but all meet one another to form the whole. The common bond I have with those who share my Italian ancestry prevents me from readily being drawn into enmity with those people on the basis of, for example, politics. If I were, for example, a Republican, I could not think too ill of Democrats--because, after all, Pete Rodino is a Democrat and he's a paisan. And of course we all have loyalties based on factors other than our ethnic heritage that bind us together with other Americans--we go to the same church as they, or belong to the same union, or went to the same college. It is these intersecting loyalties to small segments of the society that bind the society together. So I say you can be proud of your Italian heritage--as the Irish can of theirs, and the Jews of theirs--without feeling any less than 100 percent American because of that. While taking pride in what we have brought to America, we should not fail to be grateful for what America has given to us. It has given us, first and foremost, a toleration of how different we were when we first came to these shores. What makes an American, it has told us, is not the name or the blood or even the place of birth, but the belief in the principles of freedom and equality that this country stands for. There have, to be sure, been instances and periods of discrimination against Italian Americans, just as there have been against all other new arrivals. But that was the aberration, the departure from the norm, the failure to live up to the principles on which this Republic was founded. If you do not believe that, you need look no further than the actions of the greatest American of them all, the Father of our Country, George Washington. During his first term in office as president, Washington wrote a letter that is a model of Americanism, addressed to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. This blue-blooded, aristocratic Virginian assured that small community that his administration, his country, would brook no discrimination against that small and politically impotent community. And that the children of Abraham, as he put it, were welcome in this country, to live in peace and never to have fear. Excerpted from Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived by Antonin Scalia All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.