Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Christopher Scalia Scalia Speaks 20180224

Him but this is not a book about Court Opinions but about speeches. Why speeches . To as you said his Court Opinions are memorable and im often told by law students and reporters that they went to the prince first for that reason and they were so fully written and evocative and powerful in his speeches have some of the same qualities, really the great qualities that his opinions do you think the advantage of the speeches is that he could let more of his personality shine through one thing. Is a great performer with a little bit of a ham in him and he played mcbeth in High School Production of that play and he was, i think, the president of georgetowns pure club so that the ethical side times through in the speeches and way that it just doesnt in the opinions. Court opinions are necessarily they have to follow certain conventions that are apt to turn off the average person who is not a court follower or law students we wanted a collection that would be of interest to the layman really that would be interesting to the average american is not just the legal nerd and welladjusted normal people dont spend all their time reading Court Opinions speak to exactly, normal people wont read opinions but you write up it but not the whole thing. To one of the advantages to be to. He could explain without having to focus on the the case that bringing multiple cases and the co editor ed whelan and i were sure to one that would be understandable to anyone not just the law student and then of course theres the range of subject matter. Obviously, there plenty of speeches about the law in here in a section devoted to defenses of his approaches to the law and his jurisprudence but a lot of students have nothing to do with the law and readers will be interested in some of the very different and surprising subjects he touches on it. My that was certainly my reaction. I knew his views on the law and heard some of the law speeches but this book is so many wonderful speeches about High School Graduations were talking about his catholic faith to catholic audiences talking about so many subjects and that was one of the real deal book there were a couple that surprised me and he spoke a couple of times at the National Wild Turkey Federation not really place youd expect to see sprint for justice included speech but one of those conventions in which my father explains how he became interested in hunting and why he loves it as much as he does and im not a hunter myself but i still enjoyed the beach because it shows the side of my father that i knew a little bit about but learned more about that speech back you mentioned that you did this with. With Justice Phelan and he is a traffic writer himself and someone who we greatly admired Justice Scalia so how did you do it . Was there a file cabinet full of typed up speeches or did you do any transcribing of audio recordings of speeches . We did not do audio transcription be there is one exception but all of the speeches once he had sharpened and revised pretty carefully himself. Only a couple had ever been published before and after the great things in this collection but the way we said about this is basically we got a couple of binders speeches secretary, angela, and we had to binders of about 50 speeches each, i think, spanning going back to the early 80s through the present and in addition to those two binders which were easy to navigate we had a big box of list speeches, a couple of which were different versions or redundant versions of what we had in the binders but most of them were fresh ones hadnt encountered. Sort through those list speeches and then there was another box of floppy disks which some of your viewers might not even remember but an archaic form of storing information so i had to sort through the speeches and again, a couple of them were once we already had but there was the speeches there, too. It involved sorting and assisting but were surprised by how many great speeches he had. We both knew he spoke a lot and we knew that he spoke not just about the law he knew he spoke at the addresses and spoke at my High School Graduation so i was aware of that but again, the Turkey Hunting speech i had no idea about. It was the range of speeches that was surprising in the consistent quality of them was surprising. As editors i think the hardest thing ed and i had to do was decide what to not include there were no theres a lot of good material that we couldnt include. Going back to thinking of the general reader that was the cut off and if he thought that something would be to in the weeds for a general audience excluded. For their multiple versions of the same speech because i recall Justice Scalia talk to places different years and my impression was he had a stump speech and he knew what he wanted to say and as you said he was a wonderful performer and a good speechmaker and part of it is the substance but part of it is once he would emphasize but is it the correct sense that he had a speech about ritualism and the law and he could go to a lot of places and take that and deliver the material in the stock. Guest i think i know the stump speech were framed in its about ritualism and why its. To what is called the living constitution approach to jurisprudence and i heard him deliver that speech in madison, wisconsin in 2001 and its what he delivered very often and it was a stump speech. Im looking forward to finding a written version of that because i love that speech and thought it was great and it included a wonderful passage where he compared the living constitution approach to a Television Commercial from the 1980s where a prego commercial where someone is making pasta and heating up storebought pasta sauce and husband says wife you are using this storebought sauce are not doing it homemade . What about oregano and the wife says it is in their. What about the paper . Its in there. The garlic . Its in there. And my dad would say weve got that kind of constitutional you want a right to abortion it in there. Anything that is good and true and beautiful, it is in there. No matter what the text says and i thought that was in a popculture document itself and having watched the commercial with my father i thought i love that passage is the keyboard to finding it but he never actually apparently felt that speech down so we had a version of it a very different version of it in the collection when he delivered in australia i think in the early 90s and that particular version which he delivered very often he never wrote down and instead he worked from a very quick series of notes that he called the outline and the outline was just a set of prompts that he would and if you didnt speech you would look at this outline and think what could this possibly mean and there were only about 50 words on it and some of them are misspelled and then he would photocopied the outline and write notes on it for any given occasion for the people think the speech or new ideas that pop in his head and unfortunately there is no reference to the prego Television Commercial on the outline but we were surprised that is how we did it but he just knew what he wanted to say so clearly it was easy for him to off that basic outline what you said you were a student at the university of wisconsin and one of the things i remember and i will be talking to him about it was he would go out to a lot of universities and there would be would almost surely have a lot of protesters and maybe it has gotten worse now than it was then but even years ago or whatever i always admire the fact that he would go to law schools and universities where he knew there was going to be some people who didnt like him and he did it anyway. He is not shy about what he thought he was a great guy and didnt mind being criticized and its unfortunate that the way politics have gone these days and people tend to go to places where they will be welcomed and liberals go in place and conservatives go another. You remember him going to wisconsin and getting some protest or guest it was in 2001 shortly after the bush the gore decision he wasnt terribly popular in madison, wisconsin. There were protesters outside and it wasnt a violent demonstration or anything but a handful of demonstrators outside holding pictures of hitler, mussolini and my dad so pretty subdued stuff, nothing too terrible. And like you i wonder what would be the case now. Im assuming it would be more intense now and that was outside. Inside the lecture hall the audience was pool and they were trip there were pretty intense questions after words and certainly plenty people who disagreed with him and let him know that and there was some combative back and forth even. It wasnt all polite so but my father delivered speeches in what you might call hostile territory because he believed he could persuade people to believe that people in general were persuadable and open to reason, even people who disagreed with him. Not at the very least he wanted them to hear his ideas unfiltered and i think thats why he delivered speeches as often as he did and as many speeches as he did. He really believed he could people and i think that even if he didnt persuade people to agree with him he was at least able to show that he wasnt a character that many had going into this speech for the event. Host thats always the reaction i heard from the speeches that talking to people are reading about them is a fair number of students would be quoted as saying what you think and they would say i didnt agree with Justice Scalia but he made a good argument for this or whatever and it came away thinking that they learned something that caused them to think twice about what they thought and that he really could win over people to say this is a smart guy and hes got a good point and i hadnt thought of it or understand the argument he was making but he also had like no one else at the court that law he love to argue and that there is a combat of ideas and i remember asking him once here written some opinions that were critical of Justice Oconnor and people said well, you know, it sounds like youre going hard on Justice Oconnor and he said we are friends and we disagree on some things and i view this and you come out to the middle bring in new tab gloves you come out swinging and i said Justice Oconnor didnt see it that way but his view was that you argued about the law and that was the way to do it because thats the way to grapple with what is right answer and people disagree you talk it out. Guest and he often said hes recorded as saying i dont attack people, i attack ideas and a lot of very good people have very bad ideas and that is how he saw it. He didnt in his opinions obviously do ad hominem attacks and he didnt do it in the speeches either and we expect people to give it back to him. He didnt expect going back to the fox analogy he asked the people to take down punches at him, too. Justice ginsburg writes forward to this collection and one of the things she mentioned is that they people may know they were good friends and they also were good colleagues because they help each other writing their opinions by pushing back at each other in the draft explaining how they can improve an element of their argument by taking into account this point for changing the spacing here and there. Even though they disagreed they were trying to help each other out by pushing back and my father thought again going back to the concept of persuasion its possible to see people as possible to help one another five at the truth of the matter but not by just saying what you want without any feedback there has to be giveandtake there and some conversation basically. Host their friendship is one of the wonderful things in washington you dont see much anymore that there was on the opposite ideological side of a lot of big issues but they always they were friends in the 1980s they were friends until the end and they got together regularly and Justice Scalia always spoke well of Justice Ginsburg and he might not join one of her opinions but he would never deride her and he expected her and she respected him and they were friends and its unfortunate that you just dont see a lot of that anymore. People who are fundamentally different political or ideological but unless they Work Together to be friends. Guest it does seem like ideology taken a hold of everything and i think people let that happen there missing out on encounters with a lot of great people and great friendships. In their case they focused on what they had in common and it was an awful lot. They were born while my dad was born in trenton but they grew up in new york around the same time so they have that in common. That was an element to their friendship and the most loved opera and they had cameo appearances in office together and their spouses were great friends, too. My mother is a great cook and Justice Ginsburg husband, marty, is basically a gourmet chef and Justice Ginsburg and my dad both like to eat, apparently, so that was another element of their friendship that i think by focusing on those things they had in common was how the project arrived. I think someone asked my father once basically how you like Justice Ginsburgs much when you disagree about everything and he said what is there not to like . Shes a wonderful person. Host except review the law. Guest exactly. Host i have them together at the gw a couple years ago and they could joke with each other and Justice Scalia was saying we took that trip to india together and there was a big problem because we were on this element and i was up in the front and all of her feminist friends didnt like the fact that she was sitting behind me and as he finished Justice Ginsburg in that modest way of her said well, i was told it was a matter of redistribution of weight. [laughter] which he got a kick out of so they both could joke each other and have fun. Tell me this book really is full of speeches on all kinds of topics and tell me some of your favorites. Guest it is hard to narrow it down out of a handful. Obviously the legal speeches are probably the ones that we hope will secure his legacy but theres so much more to him in life and i think thats the great thing about this collection. You see so much of that. Couple of my favorites one of my favorites is one that for the sake of collection he called the arts. This is one of my favorites because the context is fascinating. I didnt know who deliver the speech i was fascinated when i discovered it. He delivered it at the Juilliard School in new york city, very well known school of the arts and he was on the occasion of the schools 100 anniversary and there was a symposium about the arts in American Society on joseph knew my father was interested in the opera and new is a conservative justice would offer opinions that wouldnt be hurt very often in new york city and he thought the one he and my father would fit right in and on the other he would challenge the audience a little bit but to his great credit, i think, he reached out to my dad and he tells me that my dad was skeptical at first but was convinced and decided to participate and im glad he did. It was part of a fascinating panel and other speakers on this panel were David Mccullough the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, i believe, and upper singer Renee Fleming and broadway composer Steven Sondheim so it has a group of people and very disparate bunch, too. Not sure my father realized this but Steven Sondheim cowrote music for west side story and my father was a big fan of officer koepke which he cowrote and he even worked some lyrics from officer koepke into a dissent, i think. Some Court Opinion and i dont think my father realized that at the time but he wished he had a chance to talk about that during counter. Apparently my father got along with him very well and for the speech and at the speech itself he tells me it went over great and it was faculty students come artist and law students from around the city and my father begins the speech by recognizing how out of place he is and how incongruence his presence is and let me find the beginning. It is great. Host i remember that one. Guest he said im happy to be here this afternoon to tell you the truth somewhat surprised to be here this afternoon. Todays program reads like some type of iq test which of the following is out of place diva, author, composer, lawyer he begins its a brilliant piece he begins with a selfdeprecating humor and he does that a lot but then he explains why lawyers are in fact important to artists and they create the condition in which the artist can thrive. The contract law and stuff like that. He eventually wins the audience over and refers to lovers of the arts and get some underside in brilliant rhetoric, i think, for the second half of the speech he challenges them by saying by discussing the First Amendment and he says we lovers of the arts like to believe that all matter of the arts would be protected by the First Amendment and the freedom of speech. In fact that is not the case and my father goes on to explain why some of the arts everyone in the room would like dance, for example, would not actually be protected by the freedom of speech and his argument was that through an originalist indication of the freedom of speech that phrase meant something very particular to the founders and it didnt include some things. It didnt include and opera libretto but it might include sorry, it would include the libretto but not the opera music. It might not even include the libretto if the libretto were just ugly and poorly written and that is technically not protected, if im remembering his argument correctly. He challenges the audience by saying we might want all of the things to be protected under the First Amendment but they arent necessarily. The appropriate approach to the constitution is it to understand it as defending and protecting everything alike. It protects a lot of things you dont like and leaves a lot of things you like unprotected. Its a brilliant speech because of the different ways he approaches the audience and again, the context was so fascinating. Host i thought the same thing where the speeches were there for the arts and in about 20 minutes they learned a lot of copier Law Enforcement law and he speaks very concisely and tells you in a way that you can understand a whole lot of body of law in a very short time. Guest says host he says he was invited to give commencement addresses and he would ask people for advice and the one consistent vice he always got was keep it to 15 minutes. You dont know whether he did it but i did think his speeches are concise and they say a lot in a relatively few pages. Guest especially in high School Commitment he knew wasnt the real story there but it was the students so he wanted to do it quickly. I heard him speak a few commencement addresses and we include a couple of them in here and they were always entertaining, easy for his audiences to understand and he mentioned but still not just full of platitudes and again challenging. He taught and challenged with every time we spoke. Host is a classic on that one, i thought, that i called platitudes and wisdom and it says he gave the speech at your brother pauls graduation at Langley High School and you said he might have given it more than once but i thought it was an amusing he begins giving the commencement address is not safe enterprise as it used to be that sometimes the students sit around and make up jokes and he says a few weeks ago the Washington Post published a bingo card containing some of the most typically used graduation platitudes ranging from this is not an end, a beginning to you are the future leaders of america and then he says the idea was that you would take a card to the Graduation Ceremony and if the speaker is really platitude enough you can check off a whole string of old chestnuts grow up across the entire class would stand up and in unison youll be go and then he says your principal, doctor manny, is probably angry that at for me giving extra classes idea and he says ive heard speeches where i wanted to jump up and yelping go even without the benefit of a bingo course. That speech is about the things that speakers say like this is an unprecedented crisis and he says no, it isnt. I thought it was wonderful graduation from High School Graduation. Guest and at the end of the speech, by the way, he comes back to that bingo card idea after he goes to the serious points and he says good luck and lets see, if unless platitude around here somewhere oh yes the future is in your hands. Go and i always i heard him deliver a version of speech couple times and i loved and got a kick out of him ending it with by yelling bingo. Host there something classic about Justice Scalia that so many High School Graduation speeches are full of those platitudes we goes and gets graduation speech that makes fun of platitudes and says its why they are not correct. Guest and he mentioned at one point about dont think one of points is to not think youre facing unprecedented challenges its a matter of degree, not in kind so environment of parents and those have been around a long time and we may be facing a different one now and he says there that the reason its dangerous to think youre facing an unprecedented challenge is that it will demoralize you a little bit but prevent you from looking back learning from history and trying to learn lessons past. Even while he is having fun with the platitudes he is drying a really important lesson. Host theres a line about never compromise your principles and follow your star and dont compromise your pixels. He said think twice about your principles because if theyre the same as hitler or lenin you want to think twice about them its more important to be sure your pixels are correct rather than in a sense finally following principles that would lead you the wrong way. Guest marry that passage . He says im here to tell you that it is much less important how committed you are then what you are committed to. If i have to choose i will undoubtedly take the left dynamic even the lazy person who knows what is right than the zealot in the cause of error. He may move slower but he is headed in the right direction. Movement is not necessarily progress. More important than your obligation to follow your conscience or at least prior to it is your obligation to your conscience correctly. Nobody, remember this, nobody ever proposed evil as such and neither hitler, nor lenin, nor any other desperate you can name ever came forward with a proposal that read lets create a really oppressive and evil society. Again, poking fun at the platitude and the humorous way but by the end of that section diving home a very serious point pretty clearly. Host i couldnt agree more. Thats a way of delivering a High School Commencement that says something significant and memorable but he doesnt in the guise of making fun of or knocking down platitudes so. Guest the speech includes another he considers the platitude, the United States is the greatest country in the world and he says i dont mean to contradict this platitude but i think we need to consider for a moment why we believe this. I believe this but i want to make sure we believe it for the right reason which is classic my father. Even in his opinion, you know, and so he goes on to explain why we should think the United States is the greatest country and he says we are the greatest because of the good qualities of our people because of governmental system that gives room for those qualities to develop. He goes on to elaborate on that basically the constitution not just the bill of rights the framework of the constitution. Host theres a speech after that where he spoke to Law School Classes in someone is quoted as saying that she remember the speech for years and i thought in that one, two, he talked about what a lawyer does and what a lawyer work is and i thought in a relatively concise speech he talked about the compulsive decision with words and it was a surprise to me when i started and he said they will spend a full hour, a major case comes up and frequently returns on what is the meaning of a particular word and so he makes the point that that is what lawyers do is to spend a long time trying to be precise about words spewed hundred. Guest this is a speech he compares lawyers to poets and he says poets love ambiguity and they love vague language and the job of a lawyer is to remove language of all ambiguity and to be as clear as possible and he says if you have any interest in being a poet, get out now because those two careers are at odds. He makes fun of poets a couple times which is always funny to me because i like poetry and he has a great line in it when he says theres another platitude he examines and theres a speech called legal canard like the graduation speech were talking about where he analyzes some common legal saying that he cant stand and one of them is emersons line of foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and obviously not a legal expression but one that he often encountered in brief and he says of everson i think in a generally sound policy to leave those alone if they leave you alone and he goes on to explain that hes not leaving us alone here so have to analyze it and again it comes back to the different types of writing and thinking necessary for a lawyer as other professions including in this case poets. Tell me about your experience as the sun and you were in Elementary School when he went on the court in 1986 . Guest i was ten years old, yes. Host how did that change things in life are on the house . Guest well, first it helps to remember that growing up the most remarkable thing about my family on a day to day basis was there was so many of us and i have eight siblings and we werent ever all nine of us living in the house at all time but there were a lot of us in the house so that was the most remarkable thing so we were already a weird family or unusual growing up in what changed in 86 was obviously he was in the papers more use of federal judge already and i knew that was a big deal but there wasnt a lot of Media Attention for that but the day he was nominated i remember watching to see my dad until the and i remember the next day hanging out with some neighbors at the pool and noticing or dissenting that people were talking about me maybe that was paranoia but i think its probably accurate so it became more public but i didnt get a sense of how i didnt get a sense of the jobs real significance until about going to middle school and high school and then i understood what my dad was up to what his job was and why he was as a justice they were getting attention. And even with all of that and the evidence of his position my dad made a point of being home every night for dinner and he led the family in grace before meals every night and i took that for granted growing up and in fact sometimes i didnt like it because it meant we had to wait longer for dinner because of traffic or Something Like that but now i dont have nearly as many to the seated and i 28 the efforts he took to make the families a normal family and especially growing up in the dc area it is hard for a lot of parents to be home with their kids and spend time with her kids and im grateful my father did that so in some ways it was different from my friends families but in other ways and the ways i noticed the most is pretty similar to one that is impressive because its one of the things in a job like that in washington or whatever you can have a lot of evening encounters and travel and trips and all that. Guest and obviously he went on trips and i mentioned in my instruction when every summer he and my mom would go on the way to europe or Something Like that for a teaching speaking excursion and my older siblings never be would take advantage of that by having a few friends over but and after dinner he would go back to work so i knew he was busy but that time was when i would ask you if did he do work at home on the evenings and weekends. Guest he did, often he went back to study on the evenings in the house and i love that study bookshelves, a fireplace he never used a decorative fireplace but he would be aura of that room always me but he would treat a place in their and later there would be a computer in there any type away on his opinions once he did a lot of running. Guest yeah, he did. I often walk by when the door was open he would be leaning over the keyboard looking at the screen revising or he had another reading chair where hed read to the priests and highlight them in things like that want kids unnoticed, with the do not know this but that. Guest i dont remember him saying that but it was given. Sometimes we had we forgot study was right by the foyer so we would hang around there and maybe be too loud and he would sometimes remind us but usually we knew and wed be upstairs doing her homework anyway so or downstairs watching tv preferably one did you ever go up to the court and watch arguments or see him in action in different places . Guest i did hear him give a few speeches and i only saw one oral argument and i was really regret that. My wife has a law degree and up until shortly before my dad died we when we were married we never lived appears we didnt get chances to see them together but it was my mom or im sorry, my wife got to see oral arguments but i only saw one. I enjoyed it but wished i had taken better advantage of that opportunity while i had the chance. I took that for granted but i went to the court occasionally and you know visited his chambers went to advance their and i loved going there such a building and a great aura to it. Host i covered i actually started covering the court the summer he arrived in 1986 and everyone said i didnt have full appreciation of him. He change the court there was no dull oral arguments were just as coolio was there because even if there was a dull argument he would ask a question that said counsel you want us to say blue means black and he would ask a question and put the foyers on notice that he wasnt buying whatever they were saying and anyway he is a wonderful sense of comic timing and hes very smart guy and if a lawyer would make an argument that didnt make sense he would spend and give one of those zingers so there are a lot of reasons why the courts say they dont want the oral arguments on television but its one of my regrets is that students and the general public couldnt watch some of those arguments because they are interesting to begin with but he always enlivened the argument and pushed both sides and made it up made it a more interesting district when i started there were very old justices who mostly would sit there for the hour in less than but Justice Scalia thought this was an opportunity to go in there and ask question that was on his mind and someone ought to answer it so he enlivened it and it continued on after that. There will not be anyone like Justice Scalia but the arguments are much more likely thanks to him. Guest thats my understanding, too. I think he brought the background is as a law professor and he was a law professor for some time but he brought that professorial demeanor and approach to oral argument and in he did change or arguments and now if you dont speak every time people think something is wrong with your approach but back then it was much more subdued and he brought liveliness that most people participate in the. Host it reminds me of the dose of the. That when he arrived in 1986 lewis powell was there one year retired at the end of the year and people that said that Justice Powell thought i remember i stopped to see the now retired Justice Powell in richmond and i said we bothered at all the Justice Scalia asked too many questions and he said, you know he was a law professor and he got to speak for the flower so i think it was a little bit of saying yes, maybe but everyone basically caught up after a while and he change the argument from all to the good because its a much more Lively Exchange because of the justices are fully engaged in asking questions. Theres an awful lot of speeches about subjects and his catholic faith and a big theme of the book and tell me about one of those speeches in your thoughts on that. Guest ill talk about a couple from that section. He valued or the great emphasis on his speeches about religion, probably second only to the speeches he delivered about the law and he really refined these in policies and in particular he delivered one that was the question, create or as he called it at other times the two thomases. In that speech he focuses on or discusses the differences between Thomas Jefferson, the great founder, obviously, and st. Thomas moore was one of my fathers heroes and the year after my parents got married they traveled around europe a little bit and saw the robert bolt play a man for all seasons about thomas moore. It really impressed both of them and left a deep imprint on my father throughout his life. What impressed him about thomas moore was his respect for the law and but also his devotion to his faith that it was possible to have both of those things. As opposed any contrast that with Thomas Jefferson who had a version of the bible, the jefferson bible, he edited the bible basically the new testament to remove references thats unbelievable or anything i was in the jefferson bible concludes with the death of christ. There is no record of resurrection or miracles. My father uses those two important figures as contrasts and tells delivers a speech often to get the players and telling them that thomas moore is a great model for you and i will review the end of the speech. It is in the hope of most speakers to impart wisdom and it has been my hope to impart to those already twice in christ the courage to have their wisdom regarded as stupidity and are we thought to be fools . No doubt but as st. Paul wrote to the corinthians we are fools for christ sake and are rethought to be easily led and childish . Christ did describe us as she. Instead we should not get to heaven unless we became like little children. It was a reminder specific christian audience that they would be seen as peculiar to nonchristians particularly in secular environments obviously. He always thought that speech was crucial to him and his set of speeches he delivered that one often and theres another speech he delivered called space in judging which is, i think important because it clarifies the relationship between his face and the law and i think it will dispel a lot of preconceptions people have of the fear that he was some sort of theocrat. In the speech he makes very clear that although he takes his religion seriously his job as a lawyer or as a justice is not to post his religious beliefs or policy preferences on the law and he gives the example of abortion. Let me read a little bit here. First he says just as there is no catholic way to cook a hamburger so also there is no catholic way to interpret a te text, analyze of historical tradition or discern the meaning and legitimacy of prior judicial decisions except of course do those things honestly and perfectly and he goes on to explain how this applies tos attitude toward abortion law. I find myself somewhat embarrassed therefore when catholics or other opponents of abortion come forward to thank me earnestly for my position concerning roe v wade. I must tell them that i deserve nothing but that position is not a virtuous affirmation of my religious beliefs or even a salacious policy choice but simply the product of a lawyerly analysis of constitutional text and tradition. And that of legal analysis to produce the opposite conclusion i would have had to come out the other way regardless of their or my views concerning abortion. My religious faith gives me a personal view on the right or wrong of abortion but it cannot make a text say yes where it in fact says no or if tradition say we permit where in fact it has said we forbid. My position on roe v wade were reflection of catholic beliefs and policy preferences then i would say that the constitution not only permits the banning of abortion but requires it and imaginative judges have derived results much more possible than that in the convict provision of the constitution is no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. In fact, however, the constitution does not ban abortion any more than it confers a right to abortion and no amount of religious faith or zealous enthusiasm can change that. That is going back to the idea similar to an idea he was presenting in speech for the arts that just because you like a policy or dislike about the intermediates defended or rejected explicitly in the constitution. Host i thought that was and im glad you are that because its another good passage for people to understand his view and his views on the law in particular to something as controversial as abortion because i think his consistent view all along was constitution doesnt settle this and what we ought and this is up to each state and the in a country like this when there was no roe versus wade some states would allow abortions in some states would forbid it but it would not be decided by the constitution. Guest that was my fathers general argument in favor of religion and against the living constitution approach to interpretation. He believed that the living constitution approach which basically argues that the constitution evolves with the morals and standards of the times. As opposed to regionalism whereby justices try to interpret the constitution according to its original public meaning, what it meant when it was ratified and similarly textualism is basically original is for laws and statutes. What did it mean then and what people think they were actually voting for on the senate floor . He believed that the living constitution approach basically allowed justices to seize too much power from voters and legislators by making them the arbiters of an ages or the countrys morals and standards and values at any given time. He had a more modest view of the churchs job in a lot of ways which is that the law does it Say Something than the people have to fill in the gap and is not the role of a justice to do that. Host he does talk about a ritualism a lot. Its an important idea and one of his favorite ideas. Talks to a lot of different audiences including a speech called interpreting the constitution. Says i am one of a small but hardy group of judges in academics in the United States, speaking to australia, who subscribe to the control of constitutional patient known as originals. Originalist believe that the provisions of the constitutions have a fixed meaning which is not change, they mean today what they mean when they were adopted and nothing more, nothing less. That is one of those, i find that appealing and i think most people do. I almost regret in a book like this or whatever that you dont have Justice Scalia answering questions about some of this because the hard part is whether you take the provision to have a fixed narrow meaning or a fixed principle i know he dealt with this a few times in the brown versus board of education is way to illustrate it, 1954 the Supreme Court strikes down School Segregation and violates the equal protection clause and the equal protection clause was added in 1868 and no state may deny any person equal protection of the laws in the same Congress Allowed segregated schools in washington dc. In the 1890s court in a separate allowed separate Railroad Cars and then in 19 before they changed direction said no, look at america today, having separate schools for blacks is inherently unequal. So i think the hard question is i think Justice Scalias view was equal protection clause or bids Racial Discrimination always did but the very people who passed it didnt think it had that meeting so that if you said it only had the fixed meaning in the narrow sense of 1868 then it would suggest a brown versus education was a madeup new meaning so thats where the debate. Guest and brown be poured is a particular one because he doesnt address that in this book, as you mentioned but i believe he does in reading the law, a book he worked on with coauthor Brian Gardner and i think he does not to say i dont have a legal background i dont know the details but i do know the address that particular argument in another book. I wish i could give you an answer now. He does give the example of womens suffrage and argues that back then nobody understood that to mean that women could vote. They believed that it meant they had to go out and fight for an amendment and when it that way. Host right. Guest i dont know how that applies to brown very board of education. To give you an answer. Host its one of those things that Justice Scalia is a firm advocate for his view and it almost seems that you wished he was still here to say okay but what about this. Guest and one thing he says often is he doesnt think a ritualism is perfect. He thought it was one of the best approach out there. Nor did he think that originalist would always arrive at the same conclusion and he gives the speeches examples and instances which he and Justice Thomas arrive at different ends of an opinion both approaching it as originalist. He also gives the example of heller the dc gun control case from 2008 or 2010. Host 2008. Guest in the case the minority decision also he wrote the majority and obviously he took an originalist approach but minority opinion also approached it, not as thoroughly and emphatically as originalist but also used some of the methods he had been preaching about. Host i remember that well. The Second Amendment says a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed and Justice Scalias opinion goes back to england in britain and basically says the right to have a gun was always seen as a central right and Justice Stevens innocence is yeah, but look at the summit amendment was about state. Ellipsis and so they go back and forth and i think a lot of people thought those interesting situations for justice glia method or approach had one over the court but it didnt resolve because both of them had a different view about the original meaning of that provision. Guest my fathers argument there is he discusses it here and importantly i dont remember the precise page number but yeah, at the time that subordinate clause that introductory clause referring to a specific event that the founders would have been familiar with and the other early americans would have been familiar with and it wasnt the only defense but in many. Host for a lot of lawyers and i think justice and the courts one of the other great things he did was you have to its hard to explain to an ordinary audience is the whole notion of text that you interpret statutes based on what the text says and i always thought i was thought people would say what else to do but it was the case when he came on court frequently the justices would say was the purpose of this statute and so im a member i remember a famous case in the 1970s 1964 cars passed a law that says you may not disseminate and no one may discriminate against employees because of their race, sex or gender and in the mid 1970s however there was a question of affirmative action where companies were saying every other new hire is going to be an africanamerican to make up for and the question is to follow the text says dont discriminate against anybody by race or do you fall on the purpose . Guest thats a great example. Host in so i do think its not as discussed or controversial but he made an enormous difference of focusing Supreme Court attention in almost all judges on okay but what does the statute actually say and lets not think about what they were trying to do but what does it say and there was so many arguments i went to where he would basically get the lawyers to say what does it say and they would spend the time focusing on the words and its a very significant change in law. Guest yeah, as you know, the warren court in particular took that living constitutionalist approach and my fathers attitude was he wasnt introducing anything new with a ritualism or textualism. He was trying to basically revive those approaches back and it also is been that way until relatively recently. Again, that puts a lot of responsibility on lawmakers to craft their laws carefully and be precise in their language and it also meant that my father didnt like looking at what is called legislative history. When focusing on the intent of the law lawyers and judges would often look to congressional records and what people say and converts meetings, for example. Were they trying to hash out in my one of my fathers arguments against that was that the people voting on this law werent voting on commerce meetings. A few of them were in the conference meetings or even knew about the internal discussions. They were voting on what the law actually said the proper text of the law. That is what people were voting on and the representatives were voting on so that the justices should be interpreting and focusing on. He also pointed out that legislative history once Congressional Staff and congressmen and women realized that lawyers and judges were looking at legislative history they could basically doctorate and read a statement to get a specific interpretation in the congressional record so could be used as legislative history when judges are trying to interpret the law even if it had no actual appearance in the text itself. Host i think that was one of the advantages he had in being a Justice Department lawyer for a number of years before he went on the court because he thought that in what was happening and i think he knew that became a game that the Committee Staff would take a report and file a report and say here is what this really meant and the danger was that it wasnt necessarily part of the agreement but and he has done, i think, a great to lessen the focus on legislative history and its one of the many delightful things in this but we have basically run out of time but i wanted to thank you and edit whelan for doing a wonderful job of putting together these speeches. I think its a great read for a lot of lawyers and interest people because it not only talks about the law and does it in an engaging way talks about it in a whole other aspects and growing up and makes for a wonderful read. Guest thank you. Is a pleasure to talk with you and an honor to work on the bo book. Host thank you, christopher. For nearly 20 years and up on the tv has featured the nations best known nonfiction writers for life conversations about their books. This year is a special project we are featuring bestselling fiction writers for our Monthly Program in depth fiction addiction addition. But life march 4th. Host Linda Sarsour cofounder and co organizer of the womans march coauthor of an incredible new book together we rise. On january 21 it will be the one Year Anniversary of the largest protest in american history. How did you get involved . Take us back to the moment when you first decided to do this. Just like everybody else i had a couple minutes of despair after the november election 2016 and was online trying to figure out and analyze the situation and they started to