The passions of Scalia
USA Today’s Joan Biskupic, author of American Original, a new biography of Justice Antonin Scalia that was released this week, sat down with Tom Goldstein of Akin Gump and SCOTUSblog to talk about the man many find to be the most fascinating and funny justice on the Court.
The full podcast of the chat can be found here on SCOTUSblog, but here are some highlights from their discussion on a topic that has generated a lot of chatter among Court watchers: Scalia’s religion, and it’s effect, if any, on his rulings.
Biskupic talks about Scalia’s firm contention that his judicial views are not at all shaped by his Catholic faith. At the same time, she said, Scalia is passionate about his religion. He is also passionate about Roe v. Wade. But those are two, separate, parallel passions, Biskupic explained.
“That was one of the hardest chapters to write,” she said of the chapter titled Passions of his mind . “So many people view his rulings on abortion and church-and-state issues as being influenced by his Catholicism, even though the justice himself says: ‘Absolutely not. I read text. I am influenced by the original understanding of the constitution. I’m influenced by the text of the law.’”
But, Biskupic explained, “there are two passions here that cannot be denied, and that’s [an] an intense passion about Catholicism, [and] he has an intense passion for Roe v. Wade. And those two things cannot be denied. He says that they are parallel, that they do not intersect. But I basically put them in the same context and let him have his say, and let critics [have] their say.
“And I think what readers should draw from it,” Biskupic continues, “is that he himself believes that he cannot separate his religious life from his intellectual life. And he himself also believes that he comes to abortion independent - in terms of his decisions - independent of those religious views.”
