Justice Antonin Scalia and the Conservative Revival

Richard A. Brisbin, Jr., associate professor of political science at West Virginia University, is co-author of West Virginia Politics and Government.

Brisbin's book on Scalia draws upon all of these traditions and more, aspiring to be a comprehensive, almost biographical effort to explain the elements influencing the Justice's decision-making and the make-up of his political vision. Rich in voting data and inclusive in discussing Scalia's most important Court of Appeals and Supreme Court decisions, the book offers many fine arguments and observations. -- David Schultz Law and Politics Book Review Richard Brisbin shows us another reason why Justice Scalia is unpopular in certain precincts: In a time of value-relativism and militant identity politics, he is the leading exponent of Enlightenment beliefs. Justice Scalia's jurisprudence, Mr. Brisbin shows, seeks to protect our property from bureaucrats, to require that people be treated as individuals rather than as representatives of a class or race, and to use the rule of law as a restraint against disorder and conflict. As an advocate of postmodernism and a proud egalitarian, Mr. Brisbin appears to deplore these results, but he has the fairness to acknowledge that Justice Scalia is a tenacious exponent of the politics of reason that the Framers bequeathed to us through a written constitution. -- John O. McGinnis Wall Street Journal Brisbin argues that Justice Scalia's jurisprudence values order and stability over pragmatism and experiment, relying on a majoritarian view rather than on any nucleus of founding principles embedded in the Constitution... He concludes that the language of Scalia's legal opinions reinforces a politics of inequality by excluding the effect of social and economic factors on equality under the law. Law and Social Inquiry