The Jurisprudential Vision of Justice Antonin Scalia.

David A. Schultz and Christopher E. Smith: The Jurisprudential Vision of Justice Antonin Scalia. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996. Pp. xxv, 245. $62.50. $23.95, paper.)

A Matter of Interpretation contains the essay resulting from Antonin Scalia's Tanner Lectures at Princeton University together with commentary by Gordon Wood, Laurence Tribe, Mary Ann Glendon, and Ronald Dworkin, with a response by Scalia. The volume's title suggests that Scalia is concerned with legal interpretation; the list of commentators suggests that he is concerned more specifically with interpreting the Constitution. The Constitution is indeed the matter whose interpretation preoccupies Tribe and Dworkin in their contributions to this book and Scalia in the concluding pages of his own essay. But Scalia's essay is entitled "Common-Law Courts in a Civil-Law System" and the stalking horse of his piece is American legal education. Common law judges try to "discern the best rule of law for the case at hand" and to look for a path through earlier cases "that leaves [them] free to impose that rule" (AMI p. 9). Law schools, Scalia says, systematically encourage future judges to think like magistrates in common law courts. This is all well and good in its place (AMI p. 12), but it fosters habits of judicial conduct that are incompatible with the democratic rule of law in civil law and constitutional cases (cf. AMI p. 14).

According to Scalia's "textualism," judges should read laws and clauses of the Constitution to mean what they meant at the time they were enacted. Thus the Supreme Court was wrong, Scalia thinks, to protect children who allege sexual abuse by compelling those they accuse of molesting them to view their testimony on closed-circuit television rather than in person. This is clear, Scalia says, from the Sixth Amendment's …