Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, in 2013. | Wikimedia (public domain); Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, in 2013. | Wikimedia (public domain); Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Washington correspondent James Rosen maintains certain rules when he’s out dining with a VIP.
But when it came to lunch with U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) Justice Antonin Scalia at an Italian restaurant, decorum was set aside.
“I picked the veal parmesan because it was easy to manipulate with a knife and fork, but Justice Scalia insisted that I order the rabbit,” Rosen told a crowd of attorneys at the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) policy conference on May 12 in Arlington, Va. “I didn't really want to eat rabbit. This was nothing less than the country's foremost opponent of judicial activism overruling my lunch order and it hasn't happened to me since.”
Rosen, the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax, was at the conference promoting his book "Scalia: Rise to Greatness 1936 to 1986."
Scalia gained notoriety for defending originalism in constitutional theory and textualism in statutory interpretation, according to media reports.
“Prior to becoming a federal judge, Justice Scalia had an extraordinarily interesting and profoundly consequential career in the federal and judicial branches,” Rosen said. “My book chronicles that as well as other aspects of his rise to greatness, which include the influences of his parents, his Catholic faith, which provided the rocket fuel for his rise, his great charm, his genius, his nearly boundless capacity for hard work, and his affability.”
Previous biographies have been critical of Scalia.
As previously reported by NBC News, although Scalia sat on the nation’s highest court with Justice Thurgood Marshall, an African American, he thought that "slower-track schools" were more suitable for Black people than more competitive colleges.
“The book makes use of a vast array of documentary and personal sources that were either overlooked by or unavailable to the previous hostile biographers,” Rosen said. “These include a secret oral history of his own life that Justice Scalia conducted in Supreme Court Chambers in 1992, his seventh term on the court, where he invited a female attorney who he had known since the Ford era to come into Chambers and interview him about his whole life.”
Rosen told the audience that while Justice Scalia is the star of the book, his wife of 55 years, Maureen Scalia, is the hero.
“Her contributions really haven't received, until now, the kind of in-depth treatment that they deserve,” Rosen said. “As Justice Scalia was always want to say that Maureen raised their nine children with very little assistance from him and there’s not a dullard in the bunch.”
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