By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Murphy, Bruce Allen. Scalia: A Court of One. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. xii +641 pp.
This is an excellent biography of an extraordinary man, a jurist of first rank, an exemplary Catholic, and a devoted family man, not to mention his exceptional talent as a pianist and tuba player. The opening pages of the book provide an account of the Old World origins of the Scalia family.
Antonin Gregory Scalia was the only child of Salvatore Eugene Scalia and Catherine Panaro Scalia. In the Sicilian tradition he was named after his paternal grandfather. Salvatore Eugene Scalia was born in 1903 in Sicily, where his father was a mechanic in Palermo. Salvatore arrived at Ellis Island after his father decided to immigrate with his family to the United States.
The immigration officer who admitted the family classified Salvatore as a “laborer,” his father as a “mechanic.” Salvatore was anything but a laborer. With the advantage of a superior Italian secondary education, at age 17 he enrolled at Rutgers University where he earned a BA. He subsequently earned a Ph.D. in Romance languages at Columbia University and went on to become a professor of Romance languages and literature at Brooklyn College.
In later years, Antonin was quick to tell anyone who wanted to know that he was not the son of a poor immigrant father.
Antonin Scalia grew up in Elmhurst, a region of Queens, in what he called a “middle-class neighborhood.” His father put him in public school #13 where he would be exposed to fellow students with a variety of ethnic backgrounds rather than just fellow Catholics in a parochial school.
New York public schools at that time had “released time” on Wednesday afternoons, which allowed students to learn something of their religious faith at a neighboring church or synagogue. When it became clear that in order to have proper Catholic training something more was needed, Antonin was then enrolled in Jesuit-run Xavier Military High School at East 16th Street near Union Square in lower Manhattan.
There he received a top-flight classical and Catholic education. Students were subjected to three years of Greek, reading Homer, four years of Latin, reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Cicero’s Orations, and Virgil’s Aeneid. As a classmate tells it, there was no time for girlfriends. Students were expected to do three or four hours of homework a night, and if you were involved in other school activities, you went to school, came home, studied, and went to bed.
Scalia made straight As and was first in his class every year. Among other activities, he became a lieutenant in the elite Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, was commander of the school band, and had the lead in the school’s production of Macbeth.
Leaving New York City, Scalia furthered his education by earning a BA in history at Georgetown University in Washington and a law degree at Harvard University. In 1977, after some experience in a law firm, he accepted a professorship at the University of Chicago Law School where he remained for five years, with the exception of one year that he spent as a visiting professor at Stanford.
At that time, with his university salary and speaking and consulting fees he could easily support the family of eight children he and Maureen had at that time.
When at age 46 he joined the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, he was obliged to suffer a severe loss of income. A judge’s salary at that time was less than Scalia’s earlier professorial earnings, because as a judge he could no longer accept consultancies and other work to supplement his base salary. The family made the move, and Scalia remained in the Washington area for the remainder of his career.
On the Court of Appeals, Judge Scalia earned a reputation as an exacting jurist. Not one to compromise after he reached a decision, he would make no attempt to accommodate the views of his fellow jurists or to reach a consensus with them. Frequently dissenting from majority opinions, he regarded his dissenting opinion as the correct one, and one that might serve as principled guidance to future courts.
Those who follow the Washington political landscape will value the insights provided by Justice Scalia’s encounter with the nation’s political and intellectual elites as recounted by Bruce Murphy.
In early 1986, Chief Justice Warren Burger submitted his resignation effective with the end of the current term in May. The search for a successor ended on August 14, when the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Scalia’s nomination in an 18-0 vote; the full Senate followed by approving his appointment by a 98-0 vote.
The narrative that follows examines chronologically the opinions Scalia rendered in significant cases that reached Supreme Court. They are too numerous to mention here. Justice Scalia and his opinions are now sadly missed from that court.
The volume is graced by a set of photographs that span Scalia’s life, from his early years at Xavier High School to a lovely image of Antonin and his wife Maureen, whom he married in 1960, as they entered the White House for a dinner in 2012.
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