Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Christopher Scalia Scalia

Up next on booktv after words sub three son of the Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shares his father speeches on law, faith and virtue. Interviewed by david savage. Host Christopher Scalia your father Antonin Scalia was one of the most powerful writers in Supreme Court opinions. He wrote a lot of dissent great for people like me quoting them but this is not a book about court. The book about speeches so why speeches . Guest yeah as you said his opinions are memorable and im often told by law students and reporters that they went to his opinions first for that reason. They were so crisply written and evocative and powerful. His speeches have some of the same, really all the same great qualities that his opinions do but i think the advantage of his speeches is that he could let war of his personality shine through for one thing. He was a great performer, little bit of a ham. He played in the death in a High School Production of that play and i think he was the president of georgetown theatre club but that theatrical side shining through in his speeches and away the doesnt it in his opinions. Host Court Opinions but have to follow certain conventions that are better turn out to the average person who is not at court follower or a law student so we wanted a collection that would be of interest to the laymen really, that would be interesting to the average american and not just illegal nerd. Host welladjusted normal people who dont spend all their time reading Court Opinions. Guest they will read or write up in an opinion but probably not the whole thing. One of the advantages of the speeches especially the ones about the law my dad could explain his approach to interpreting the constitution and the law uninterrupted without having to focus on the specific case but bring in multiple cases and the coeditor at wheelan and i were sure to pick one that would be understandable to anyone not just a law student and then of course theres the range of subject matter. Obviously there are plenty of speeches about the law in here and theres a section devoted really to his defenses and is the purchase to laud this jurisprudence but a lot of his speeches have nothing to do it a lot i think readers will be interested in some bit different and surprising subjects. Host certainly was my reaction. I knew about his views on the law they heard some of his lost beaches but this book has so many wonderful speeches about High School Graduations talking about is faith and catholic audiences and talking about so many subjects. Guest there were a couple that really surprised me. He spoke a couple of times at the National Wild Turkey Federation convention, not really place youd expect to see a Supreme Court justice that we included a speech from one of those conventions which my father explains how he became interested in hunting and why he loves it as much as he does. Im not a hunter myself but i still enjoyed that speech because it showed the side of my father that i knew a little bit about but learned more about through that speech. Host you mentioned you did this with ed wheelan a law clerk for Justice Scalia in the early 90s and a terrific writer himself and someone who greatly admire Justice Scalia. How did you doing it . Was there a file cabinet full of type that speeches or did you do any transcribing of audio recordings of speeches . We didnt do any audio transit correction. Theres one exception but all of these speeches are ones that he had sharpened and revised. Carefully himself. Only a couple had ever been published before. Think thats one of the great things in his selections but the way we set about this was basically got a couple of binders of his speeches from the secretary angela and he had to binders with 50 speeches each i thank spanning, going back to the early 80s through the present and in addition to those to binders which were easy to navigate we also have an egg box of his speeches a couple of which were just different versions are redundant versions of what we had in the binders but most of them were fresh ones we having countered. We had to sort through those loose speeches and then there was another box of floppy disks which some of your viewers may not even remember but an archaic form of stored information. I had to sort through those speeches and again a couple of them were ones we are a tad but there were a lot of new speeches thereto. It did involve a lot of sorting and sifting but we 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, we knew he spoke at commencement addresses and he spoke at my High School Graduation. I was aware of that but the Turkey Hunting speech i had no idea. The range of the speeches were very surprising and the consistent quality of them were surprising. As editors i think the hardest thing ed and i had to do was decide, theres really no filler in here. Theres a lot of good material we couldnt include again going back to the general reader. That was really the cutoff. If we thought something would he a little bit two in the weeds for a general audience we would exclude it. Host there are multiple versions of the same speech because i recall hearing Justice Scalia talking different years and my impression was that he had sort of a stump speech. He knew what he wanted to say. He was a wonderful performer and part of it is the substance that part of it is this point he would emphasize. Is it your sense that he had sort of a speech about originalism in the law that he could go to a lot of places and take that and deliver that material and just talk . Guest he delivered, i think i know the stump speech you are referring to. Its a speech he delivered about originalism and why it superior to whats called the living constitution approach of jurisprudence. I heard him deliver that speech in Madison Wisconsin in 2001 and its one he delivered very often. I was looking forward to finding a written version of that because i loved that speech. It included a wonderful passage where he compared the living constitution approach to a Television Commercial from the 1980s where a commercial where somebody is making pasta and heating up storebought pasta sauce and the husband says to his wife you are using the storebought sauce and you are not doing it homemade . What about the oregano and the wife says its in there. What about the pepper . Its in there. The garlic . Its in their. My dad would say we have got the kind of the constitution now. You want a right to an abortion, its in there. If you are right to die its in there. Anything thats good and true and beautiful is in their no matter what it says. Being a pop culture junkie myself and have a watch that commercial with my father i always love that passage. I was looking forward to finding it but he never actually apparently wrote that speech down so we have a version of it, a very different version of it in the collection one he delivered in australia in the early 90s. But that particular version which he delivered very often, instead he worked from a very quick series of notes that he called the outline and the outline was really just a set of props that he would rip off of. He would look at this outline and think what could this possibly mean . There are only about 50 words on it and some of them are misspelled and he would photocopy the outline and write notes on it on any given occasion like the people he should thank in his speech. Unfortunately theres no reference to the prego Television Commercial on the outline. We were surprised that thats how he did it but he knew what he wanted to say so clearly. It was easy for him to rip off that asic outline. Host you said you were a student at the university of wisconsin. One of the things i remember about Justice Scalia was that he would go out to a lot of universities and there would be, he would almost surely have a lot of protesters and maybe its worse now than it was then that 20 years ago i have always admired 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 was not shy and didnt mind being criticized. I think its unfortunate with the way politics of nonthese days people tend to go places where they will be welcomed. Liberals go one place and conservatives go another. You actually remember him going to wisconsin and getting some protest . It was in 2001 charlie after the bush v. Gore decision. He wasnt terribly popular in Madison Wisconsin and there were protesters outside. It wasnt a violent demonstration or anything. Really just a handful of demonstrators outside showing pictures of Hitler Mussolini and my dad. So. Subdued stuff, nothing too terrible and like you i will wonder what would be the case now. Im assuming it would be more intense now. That was outside. Inside the lecture hall the audience was respectful. They were. Intense questions afterwards. There were certainly plenty of people who disagreed with him and let him know that and there was some combativeness back and forth. It was not polite but my father delivered speeches in what you might call hostile territory because he believed he could persuade people and he believed people in general were pursuadable and were open to reason, even people who disagreed with him and at the very least he wanted them to hear his ideas unfiltered. I think thats why he delivered speeches as often as he did and his many speeches as he did. Really believed he could were swayed people. I think even if he didnt persuade people to agree with him he was at least able to show the caricature that a lot of people had going into the speech or the event. Host that was always the reaction that i heard from a speech either talking to people are reading about them. A fair number of students would be quoted saying but did you think . I didnt agree with Justice Scalia but he made a really good argument. They came away thinking they learned something that caused them to think twice about what they thought and he really could win over people to say this is a really smart guy and hes got a really good point. I didnt really understand the argument he was making. He also had, like nobody else in the court he loved to argue and ideas. Yet written some opinions that were critical of Justice Oconnor and people said it sounds like you are hard on Justice Oconnor. Hes a Justice Oconnor and i are friends. We disagree on some things. You come out to the middle of the ring and you gloves and you come out swinging. His view was that you argued about the law and that was the way to do it the kiss thats the way to grapple with whats the right answer. If people disagree you should talk it out. Guest hes often quoted as saying i dont attack people i attack good ideas and a lot of bad people have good ideas. His opinions obviously did ad hominem attack and he didnt do that in his speeches. He expected people to get back to him. He didnt expect going back to the boxing analogy he expected people to take punches at him too. Justice ginsburg writes the foreword to this collection in one of the things she mentions is people may know that they were good friends. They also were good colleagues because they help each other writing their opinions by pushing back at each other in the drafts, kind of explaining how they could improve an element of their argument by taking into account to this point are changing this phrase here or there. Even though they disagree they were trying to help each other out by pushing back. My father thought again going back to the concept of persuasion is possible to persuade people and its possible to help one another arrive at the truth of the matter but not by just saying what you want without any feedback. There had to be some give and take their, some conversation basically. Those of their friendship was one of those wonderful things in washington that you dont see any more. They opposites on the ideological side of a lot of big issues that they were always friendly. In the 1980s they were friends until the end. They got together regularly and he always spoke well of Justice Ginsburg. He might not join one of her opinions that he would never deride her. I think he respected her and she respected him. They were friends and its unfortunate that you dont see a lot of that anymore, people who have fundamentally different political or ideological ideas who can Work Together and be friends. Guest ideology has taken hold of everything and the people let that happen they are 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 was an awful lot. My dad was born in trenton but they grew up in new york about the same time and that was an element of their friendship and they both loved opera. They had cameo appearances at operas together and their spouses were great friends. My brother is a great cook Justice Ginsburgs brother marty was basically a gourmet chef and Justice Ginsburg and my dad would like to eat apparently so that was another element of their friendship. Just by focusing on those things they have in common was how the friendship derived. Somebody asked my father once basically how could you like Justice Ginsburg so much when he disagree about everything and he said whats there not to like . Shes a wonderful person. Host except her views on the law. Guest exactly. Host i spoke to gw a couple of years. They could joke with each other. Justice scalia said we took that trip to india together. It was a big problem for youth because we were on an elephant and i was in the front and offer them as friends than mike the fact that she was sitting behind me and Justice Ginsburg in that voice of hers said i was told it was a matter of redistribution of weight. Which he got a real kick out of. Tell me it really is full of wonderful speeches and all kinds of different topics. Tell me some of your favorites. Guest its hard to narrow it down to a handful. The legal speeches are probably the ones that we hope will secure his legacy but there is so much more. There was so much more to him in life and thats the great thing about this collection. You see so much of that. A couple of my favorites. One of my favorites is one bad for the sake of this collection which is called the arts. Its one of my favorites because the context is fascinating. I didnt know he delivered this speech so i was fascinated when i discovered it. He delivered it at the juliette school in george city, very wellknown school of the arts and was on the occasion of the schools 100th anniversary. There was a symposium about arts in American Society and the School President knew that my father was interested in the opera and knew he was a conservative justice who would offer opinions that wouldnt be heard very often in new york city. So he thought on the one hand my father would write in and on the other hand he might challenge the audience. He reached out to my dad and he tells me my dad was a little skeptical at first but was convinced and decided to participate. Im really glad he did. He was part of a fascinating panel. Other speakers on this panel were David Mccullough the pulitzer prizewinning historian i believe and opera singer Renee Fleming and broadway composer Steven Foster time. A pretty fantastic group of people and very disparate bunch. Im not sure my father realizes this but he cowrote the music for west side story of my father was a big fan. He even worked officer cross crop ski into a dissent i think. I dont think my father realized that at the time but i wish they had a chance to talk about that during their encounter. Apparently my father got along with him very well and before the speech and of the speech itself mr. Polizzi tells me it went over great. It was faculty students artists and law students from around the city. My father begins his speech by recognizing how incongruence his presence is there. The beginning is pretty great. He said im happy to be here this afternoon and to tell you the truth someone surprised me here this afternoon. Todays program reads like some cited some sort of test. Which of the following is out of place author composer, lawyer. So i think its a brilliant speech because he begins with the self deprecating humor and he does that a lot. Then he kind of explains why lawyers are in fact important to our. They create the conditions in which the arts can thrive for example contact lawn things like that. So he eventually wins the audience over and he refers to be lovers of the art to get them on his side a little bit early in the rhetoric i think that the second half of the speech he challenges them by saying, by discussing the First Amendment. He says we lovers of the arts want to believe that all matter of the arts are protected by the First Amendment by freedom of speech. In fact thats not the case and my father goes on to explain why some of the arts everybody in that room would like would not actually be protected by the freedom of speech and his argument that through an originalist interpretation of the freedom of speech that phrase was something particular to the founders and it didnt include some things. It would include an opera. It might include, sorry it would include the loretto but it would not include the opera music. It might not even include the loretto if the loretto were poorly written. That is technically not protected. He challenges the audience by saying we may want all of these things to be protected und