The Essential Scalia

“If you know a student who has recently started or returned to law school, you might want to give that aspiring lawyer a short volume of supplemental . . . reading about our Constitution and legal tradition. . . . You can do your part by sharing with them this latest and perhaps most subversive collection.”—National Review

“The editors of The Essential Scalia have skillfully collected and excerpted Scalia’s judicial writings and a few speeches and articles, and the results are as readable today as they were when they first appeared. That is no mean feat. . . . What makes so many of his opinions worth reading and rereading is not what they say about a particular statute or constitutional dispute but what they say about statutory construction or constitutional interpretation in general. . . . The book will be especially illuminating to anyone who wants to unlock the mystery of why [Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg admired Scalia—or who wants to get a sense of where the Supreme Court may be headed.”—The Wall Street Journal

“It would be difficult to name other Supreme Court justices who have had such a galvanizing effect on American politics—and who continued to play such important roles after their deaths. . . . What comes across most . . . is the quality of Scalia’s writing. It is clear, direct, witty, lapidary, memorable. Scalia’s opinions and dissents are famous for certain lines—‘this wolf comes as a wolf’; ‘What Is Golf?’—but on second reading it is the way he develops his argument that most impresses. And he always makes a perfect landing. . . . These aren’t judicial decisions. They are essays. And like great literature they will reverberate far into the future.”—The Washington Free Beacon