Rating: 
Summary: Maybe if my attention span was better...
Review: ...I'd rate this book a little higher. I am almost always in agreement with Justice Scalia. I enjoyed "his" portion of the book, but fell asleep as the other writers volleyed back. This book was a little too burdensome for me, and likely so for anyone other than an L3 or above. Bork's book, The Tempting Of America, was much more readable and enjoyable. See also Johnnie Cochran, A Lawyer's Life.I like a good debate just as anyone else does, but this book descends into the realm of "pinhead intellectualism." I guess that's necessary in the nuts-and-bolts of appellate law, but that leaves a very small audience of satisfied book buyers. While it's main point - the difference between being a "textualist" versus a "strict constitutionalist" is well taken, for most of us this book is a tough read. If you're Harvard Law (or Hofstra), go ahead.
Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent discussion beats words without meaning
Review: Adroitly Justice Scalia shows how judicial interpretation follows no known set of principles or constraints. Without a useful set of rules, the judicial branch has usurped the powers delegated to the legislative and executive branches. Instead, the judicial branch continues its common law tradition of making law for the King. Unfortunately, this practice pre-dates democratic government. The term "interpretation" now includes the raw law making and law setting-aside power that has ripped the fundamental freedom of self governance. Have you ever wondered, when you've read a recent Supreme Court ruling about the latest, newly-unconstitutional law, that the attendant ruling makes no reference to any specific part of the Constitution? Instead, Justices refer to their previously-declared law on that or even another subject. In effect, courts have "interpreted" new law, then used that interpretation or some arbitrary re-interpretation to make whatever decision they think is best. This has led to the bold ignoring of the written law in favor of what judges (and their attendant activists) believe "should" be the law. In this 50-page main article, Scalia lances a splinter in the eye of the "living Constitution" people. Don't get it, yet? Well, Scalia will be happy to jam a 2x4 piece of lumber in that same eye - his footnoting is right on point. In contrast, the critiques by famous (and liberal) Harvard law professors and other attendants pale in comparison. I suspect that is why the good Justice agreed to write the book in this manner. The Harvard types furnish only silly words-without-meaning to support their claims of a "living Constitution". The contrast is spectacular and enlightening.
Rating:
Summary: Intelligent discussion beats words without meaning
Review: Adroitly Justice Scalia shows how judicial interpretation follows no known set of principles or constraints. Without a useful set of rules, the judicial branch has usurped the powers delegated to the legislative and executive branches. Instead, the judicial branch continues its common law tradition of making law for the King. Unfortunately, this practice pre-dates democratic government. The term "interpretation" now includes the raw law making and law setting-aside power that has ripped the fundamental freedom of self governance. Have you ever wondered, when you've read a recent Supreme Court ruling about the latest, newly-unconstitutional law, that the attendant ruling makes no reference to any specific part of the Constitution? Instead, Justices refer to their previously-declared law on that or even another subject. In effect, courts have "interpreted" new law, then used that interpretation or some arbitrary re-interpretation to make whatever decision they think is best. This has led to the bold ignoring of the written law in favor of what judges (and their attendant activists) believe "should" be the law. In this 50-page main article, Scalia lances a splinter in the eye of the "living Constitution" people. Don't get it, yet? Well, Scalia will be happy to jam a 2x4 piece of lumber in that same eye - his footnoting is right on point. In contrast, the critiques by famous (and liberal) Harvard law professors and other attendants pale in comparison. I suspect that is why the good Justice agreed to write the book in this manner. The Harvard types furnish only silly words-without-meaning to support their claims of a "living Constitution". The contrast is spectacular and enlightening.
Rating:
Summary: great
Review: Although I disagree with the Justice, I found him easier to understand than his critics. I also enjoyed having different legal theories of interpretation defined. I still believe that judicial activism protects the rights of the individual better than any other method. I would rather have my rights cultivated than retarded by the government and the international (so called US) corporation.
Rating: 
Summary: A fine critique of modern legal philsophy in the US.
Review: Antonin Scalia is blessed with a powerful intellect and a persuasive manner of expression. It's about time that a member of the US Supreme Court explained in terms intelligible to the average "newspaper reader" just what is going on in federal appeals courts. If not all of Justice Scalia's recommendations are correct, he certainly, at long last, has been able to ask the right questions. Proponents of judicial activism (and Scalia graciously shares space with two of the most famous, Tribe & Dworkin) will be hard-pressed to keep up the pretense that federal courts today are much more than arenas for elite social engineers to rework society in their own image and likeness. A fine study in modern legal philosophy, I recommend this work with few reservations. My complete review of Justice Scalia's book can be found in "National Catholic Register" 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 1997, p. 6. I have seen the review posted on the Web as well.
Rating:
Summary: A tough read
Review: Antonin Scalia might be best described as a conservative American. Conservatism often means not taking the "far-out-there" approach to life.
Although his section of the book is rather short, it is a bit difficult to follow for those of us who are not lawyers. Nevertheless, it is an excellent view into his thinking process. It details the reasons for not siding with contemporary liberal thinking, believing that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted literally (in most cases).
I read the book a few pages at a time, absorbed what I read, and read more the next day. Frequently, during the responses to his writings by other prominent lawyers, I found myself going back and re-reading parts of his writings again. To complete the book and understand it I probably read the entire book several times - back and forth between the writers.
Whatever your political leanings, it is an insight into why one Supreme Court Justice votes the way he does.
I wish all the Justices would write a similar book so we could understand their viewpoints.
Rating:
Summary: Defender of America's Constitutional Order, part 2.
Review: Herein lies the central problem of The Living Constitution: If a written constitution's guarantee's are mutable through judicial interpretation, then they mean nothing at all and offer no enduring protections. The "whole purpose [of a written constitution]," Justice Scalia reminds us, "is to prevent change -- to embed certain rights in such a manner that future generations cannot readily take them away. A society that adopts a bill of rights is skeptical that 'evolving standards of decency' always 'mark progress,' and that societies always 'mature,' as opposed to rot." Advocates of The Living Constitution insist that its evolution will always result in greater, not diminished, personal freedom. Setting aside the question of why liberty should always trump authority in their primeval battle, the historical record refutes this assertion. Not only has the Court eviscerated constitutional property and contract rights -- and Scalia suggests, it may do the same to the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms -- it has moved on to truncate the Eighth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, holding that in some instances a criminal defendant no longer has the right to confront his accuser, despite the express command of the Constitution to the contrary. Unmoored from the Constitution's text as historically understood, the Court is free to decide, for instance, that modern America has too much political speech and rewrite the Free Speech Clause to provide for congressional regulation, much as the minority leaders of both houses of the Congress now propose. When a written constitution's guarantees are but wet clay in the hands of willful federal judges, law depends on caprice and we inescapably become a nation of men, not laws. For, as Justice Scalia warns, "When you are told to decide, not on the basis of what the legislature said, but on the basis of what it meant, and are assured that there is no necessary connection between the two, your best shot at figuring out what the legislature meant is to ask yourself what a wise and intelligent person should have meant; and that will surely bring you to the conclusion that the law means what you think it ought mean . . .." This is equally true in constitutional adjudication as in statutory interpretation, except that constitutional decisions are vastly more difficult to reverse. The Constitution ceases to mean what it says, ceases to codify certain prescriptive rights slowly asserted and established against the claims of the crown and its successors, and comes to solely reflect the prejudices of contemporary federal judges, which are unlikely to be reflective of broader social consensus. Russell Kirk has written, "Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by the threads of moral and intellectual belief. In the hands of the Fates are no thunderbolts: only threads and scissors." These threads are necessarily woven from below, through the slow formation of social consensus; when consensus is broad and deep enough that something is thought fundamental to liberty, it is then formally added to the Constitution through Article V. But when judges take it upon themselves to legislate and amend through judicial interpretation outside of Article V, as Professor Glendon points out in her elegant commentary, "democratic elements in our republican experiment atrophy. American men and women not only are deprived of having a say on how we order our lives together, but we lose the skills of self-government." This doubtless fosters the cynicism and alienation from authority which is seen everywhere today. Early in this century Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously accused his brethren of trying to inscribe Herbert Spencer's economic theories into the Constitution. Today's activists are more likely to be influenced by the writings of John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, and take as their program the prohibition of expressions of traditional morality in American law and the institution of wider protections of avant-garde social behavior, in addition to eliminating whatever restraints remain on congressional legislative power and systematically boring holes into the walls separating our tripartite form of government, thereby abetting the growth of the administrative state. The increasing shrillness of debates surrounding issues the federal judiciary has preempted -- abortion and homosexual rights, among many others -- suggests that judicial activists are dangerously wielding the Fates' scissors, rending an already threadbare social fabric in their push for great and faster "social justice." As Justice Scalia points out, "Judges are not [] naturally appropriate expositors of the aspirations of a particular age; that task can be better done by legislature or by plebiscite." Generally, conservatives today fear that the Constitution will be transmuted into an instrument of oligarchic rule, but Justice Scalia fears the increasing politicization of our fundamental law will lead to rise of a fearful populism: "If the courts are free to write the Constitution anew, they will, by God, write it the way the majority wants; the appointment and confirmation process will see to that." Here Scalia is at his weakest. The appointment and confirmation process, like the legislative process, is more easily manipulated by a few highly motivated activists wielding influence well beyond their numbers or reasonableness than by the unwashed masses. Popular control would require political interest and exertion that the very practice of judicial activism militates against. Professor Glendon wisely asks, "Which is more likely: that unruly majorities will have their way? Or that the democratic elements in our republican experiment will wither away, while new forms of tyranny by the powerful few arise? Whom should we fear more: an aroused populace, or the vanguard who knows better than the people what the people should want?" Perhaps judicial restraint is the true Lost Cause of American history. The last five Republican presidents have had little effect on the decisions of the Supreme Court or the culture of the law; indeed, many of the greatest judicial radicals have Republican markings (Warren, Brennen, Blackmun). But Justice Scalia's masterful essay is not in vain. For, as T.S. Eliot has written, "We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph." We are fortunate in this decadent legal age that one jurist still contends gamely against the rot.
Rating:
Summary: Recommended, but with reservations.
Review: I assume you have seen a description of the book already. The book is good enough to be recommended overall, but there were some disappointments. First, the justice does not stay long on his professed topic, the interpretation of statutes, but goes over into constitutional interpretation. Those who make replies follow gladly, and there is really little on the whole about statutory instead of constitutional interpretation. Moreover, the justice did not make it clear enough to me how his textualist philosophy differs from literalism, which he explicitly disavows. Also dissappointing is that I think the justice could have made a much stronger case for what I do glean to be his philosophy by invoking legal principles already understood when the constitution was written, and especially by invoking Justice Story's brilliant decision in Martin v Hunter's Lessee. In that decision rules of constitutional interpretation are stated clearly and authoritatively, and are much along the lines of what Scalia advocates. Lastly, Justice Scalia's essay does not measure up to the keenness of insight and language he shows in his best dissents, though there are some good moments. Despite these drawbacks, it is a very thought- provoking work and its brevity gives one less of an excuse for not reading it. It is largely free of technical vocabulary and there are no arcane discussions.
Rating:
Summary: Not your father's judicial interpretation.
Review: I'd like to mention, first of all, what this book it not. It is not for the casual observer of the American judicial system. Justice Scalia gives a probing examination of various methods used in Constitutional and judicial interpretation. If the reader is not consumed with learning law, or delineating the intent of the Constitution, this book will probably be a major disappointment.
On the other hand, if you have a solid foundation of knowledge on the judiciary and the U.S. Constitution, you will enjoy this book and will learn a great deal of what Justice Scalia has to offer. Scalia offers up a 50 page paper on the various methods of judicial interpretation, each methods strengths and weaknesses, and the how and why of whether or not each method is viable.
Scalia's paper is then cross-examined by Ronald Dworkin, Mary Ann Glendon, Amy Gutmann, Lawrence Tribe and Gordon Wood. Scalia then offers up his rebuttal and I believe, strengthens his theories of judicial interpretation. I am not going to go into my own how's and why's, as I am a fan of Scalia's and would rather allow the reader to reach their own conclusions.
Whether you like this book, or hate it, one thing is for certain, you will come away with a much better knowledge of the U.S. judicial system, how it reaches some of its conclusions, and what the consequences of continuing with current methods of judicial interpretation will be on our country.
Rating:
Summary: An Insightful Discussion
Review: In this tidy book, Justice Scalia puts forward his theory of jurisprudence and takes on the subject of judicial philosophy and what he calls the modern movement of judicial activism. He begins by giving an overview of the history of common law and judicial review, in which he contends that judges historically respected stare decisis - that is, previous rulings. Only in modern times, with the rise of democratic activism, has the desire of judges to "make law" become a problem of significant proportions.
Scalia then gets to the heart of his argument - that the role of the judge is not to ascertain the intent of legislators, but rather to ascertain the meaning of the words contained in a particular document. In this sense, he a textual purist compared to activists who will search out the meaning of particular pieces of legislation by evaluating legislative history, popular press, Congressional record, etc. He concedes that language must be interpreted, but he argues that there is a disciplined approach, and a liberal approach. The disciplined approach he supports would evaluate text within the notion of reasonable interpretation, "placed alongside the remainder of the corpus juris." "Government by unexpressed intent is simply tyranny," Scalia argues. "That seems to me the essence of the famous American ideal set forth in the Massachusetts Constitution. A government of laws, not of men. Men may intend what they will; but it is only the laws that they enact which bind us." Scalia argues that the fact that some texts bear multiple interpretations does not sink the enterprise of textualism. The divide on constitutional questions is not between what the framers intended and what they wrote, but rather between original meaning and current meaning. Scalia argues it is precisely the threat of abolishing cherished rights that makes original meaning important - it is a protection against those, (say Nazis) who would seek to impose a new order or new interpretation of acceptable governance. He argues that the notion of a "living constitution" has narrowed the straits of American freedom, not expanded them. The prevailing mood may or may not be just in the eyes of history, but leave that to the legislators and the great debates among thinkers and politicians; don't seek to encode today's moods in tomorrow's constitution through judicial activism. The avenues for changing the constitution and expanding its purview are well known -- otherwise, leave legislating to the legislatures. Tribe and Dworkin offer the most interesting rebuttals. Dworkin seeks to root constitutional interpretation in broad principles of understanding and rights; Tribe concedes he has no theory of jurisprudence, other than he finds it difficult to accept the certitude of either Dworkin or Scalia that they have the right interpretation. His is a strange argument. Scalia never says the Constitution does not bear multiple interpretations, but he does argue for a more disciplined approach, in which rights are not found willy nilly in the minds of judges and then imposed on the original document by which we are governed. One annoying aspect the book: Tribe responds both to Scalia's original essay and his counter rebuttal within the first rebuttal -- before we have even read Scalia's response. This got a tad confusing and did not add much to the overall discussion.
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