Ilya Shapiro writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a new biography of US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
Mollie Hemingway has written the rare Supreme Court book that’s both useful and enjoyable. Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution works at once as biography, institutional history, and a kind of play-by-play of the Roberts Court in its most consequential years. It is, above all, a book about Samuel Alito’s jurisprudence—his “practical originalism,” as he calls it—but it’s also a book about courage: the courage to do the right thing in the face of elite panic, media hysteria, and actual threats of violence.
The timing feels right, doesn’t it? Jan Crawford recently reported that Alito has no plans to retire at the end of this term, which isn’t remotely surprising because he’s at the top of his game and has never had more influence.
But more importantly, the substance feels right. The core virtue of Hemingway’s book is that it reminds readers just how much of the modern Court’s drama turns on questions that are not especially dramatic in polite legal-company conversation: Who actually believes the Constitution means what it says? Who can withstand pressure? Who mistakes public relations for judging? Who has the stomach to overrule a notorious precedent when every institution in elite America is screaming for surrender?
Hemingway is very good on the long history of Republican judicial disappointments. …
… Hemingway is equally good on what makes Alito different. He’s not Scalia redux, despite the old “Scalito” smear, and he’s not Thomas either. Scalia preferred crystalline theory and rhetorical force. Thomas thinks strategically over the long term with remarkable intellectual audacity. For Alito, however, “judging is not an academic pursuit; it is a practical activity.” He starts with the premise that “the Constitution means something and that that meaning does not change,” but he’s also more willing than some of his fellow originalists to say when a question is bound up with messy real-world particulars.
