A FiveBooks interview with Slate's Dahlia Lithwick (hardly an originalist, or even a sympathizer) on books about Supreme Court Justices; two of her five picks are Joan Biskupic's American Original (on Scalia) and Clarence Thomas' My Grandfather's Son.
On Scalia, Lithwick says the Second Amendment case District of Columbia v. Heller was a
tour de force of his constitutional views, in which he divines the original intent of the framers and mines constitutional history for the original meaning of their words, while railing against living constitutionalism or jurists’ attempts to keep up with modern values. Heller is a triumph not just of Scalia’s political view that we should have the right to bear arms, but also of his interpretive method. He has five votes now for his way of reading the constitution.
Surely a bit of an overstatement: he had five votes for his interpretive method in Heller, but the Court doesn't give stare decisis effect to methodology; a case under a different constitutional provision will be an entirely different matter.
On Thomas, she says:
I am always astounded by how much mail I get from people who think that Thomas is a “moron” or a “Scalia clone”. He famously hasn’t asked a question at oral argument in over five years. People write that’s because he’s an “idiot”. When I get those letters, my response is – read his autobiography. Thomas is an extremely polarising figure. Conservatives revere him. He is distinctly to the right of Scalia on many issues. He is an original thinker. He has a constitutional architecture that is fully worked out in his mind, whether you like it or not. He is simply not incompetent or unworthy of serious scholarship.
More of the groundswell of grudging appreciation for Thomas' intellect and influence, as noted here.
Posted at 7:00 AM