Alone on his own ice floe: how Antonin Scalia ceased to be a powerhouse jurist and became a crank.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: On political books

Scalia: A Court of One

by Bruce Allen Murphy

Simon & Schuster, 736 pp.

The cover of this book says it all. There he is, grinning complacently, his black judges' robes fading into black. The hair has thinned and the jaw is heavier than it used to be. He is an old bull now instead of a young buck. No one is there on the cover with him: he is all alone. Smug, cocksure, fond of his own wit, certain of his rectitude, Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States is oblivious to the way his strident, obnoxious, moralistic hectoring has chased away every friend. If such a doubt occurs to him for an uncertain moment, it soon dissolves, for the upside to being surrounded by idiots is a clear conscience. Let them call him intolerant--let them try to prove he's wrong. It is all background noise to the sound of his own voice.

Scalia was once a force to be reckoned with on the legal right. He taught at the University of Chicago and cofounded the Federalist Society. When I entered law school in 2001, his dissents were required reading, and could erode confidence in any majority opinion. Scalia was particularly strong on procedure: he made nuances about jurisdiction and standing seem even more important than the merits. A brilliant rhetorician, he was a funny and colorful writer in a profession that seemed wedded to the stereo-instructions model of prose. Scalia also exuded scholarly refinement, peppering his decisions with allusions to classical works in Latin and Greek, and parsing statutory language with precision and rigor. When cracking wise off the cuff, he pivoted on arcana like the distinction between Gothic art and Rococo.

And then something happened. Somewhere in the mid-20oos, Scalia ceased to be a powerhouse jurist and became a crank. He began thumbing his nose at the ethical conventions that guide justices, giving provocative speeches about matters likely to come before the Court. He declined to recuse himself from cases where he had consorted with one of the parties-including, famously, Vice President Dick Cheney. He turned up the invective in his decisions. His colleagues' reasoning ceased to be merely unpersuasive; it was "preposterous," "at war with reason," "not merely naive, but absurd," "patently incorrect," and "transparently false." More and more, he seemed willing to bend his own rules to achieve conservative results in areas of concern to social conservatives, like affirmative action, gay rights, abortion, gun ownership, and the death penalty. Above all, Scalia stopped trying to persuade others. He became the judicial equivalent of Rush Limbaugh, who has made a career of preaching to the choir. But Limbaugh is not merely a shock jock; he is also a kingmaker. Scalia's position on the bench precludes any such influence. As a result, he has more fans than power.

The deterioration of Supreme Court justices is a sad tradition in our public life. Abe Fortas was ruined by scandal; William Douglas suffered a stroke and remained on the Court well past the point of incapacity. William Rehnquist became...