AutoBiography

Brief Summary An authoritative, deeply researched biography of the most controversial and outspoken Supreme Court justice of our time and how he chose to be "right” rather than influential. Antonin Scalia knew only success in the first fifty years of his life. His sterling academic and legal credentials led to his nomination by President Ronald Reagan to the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in 1982. In four short years there, he successfully outmaneuvered the more senior Robert Bork to be appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986. Scalia’s evident legal brilliance and personal magnetism led everyone to predict he would unite a new conservative majority under Chief Justice William Rehnquist and change American law in the process. Instead he became a Court of One. Rather than bringing the conservatives together, Scalia drove them apart. He attacked and alienated his more moderate colleagues Sandra Day O’Connor, then David Souter, and finally Anthony Kennedy. Scalia prevented the conservative majority from coalescing for nearly two decades. Scalia: A Court of One is the compelling story of one of the most polarizing figures ever to serve on the nation’s highest court. It provides an insightful analysis of Scalia’s role on a Court that, like him, has moved well to the political right, losing public support and ignoring public criticism. To the delight of his substantial conservative following, Scalia’s "originalism” theory has become the litmus test for analyzing, if not always deciding, cases. But Bruce Allen Murphy shows that Scalia’s judicial conservatism is informed as much by his highly traditional Catholicism, mixed with his political partisanship, as by his reading of the Constitution. Murphy also brilliantly analyzes Scalia’s role in major court decisions since the mid-1980s and scrutinizes the ethical controversies that have dogged Scalia in recent years. A Court of One is a fascinating examination of one outspoken justice’s decision not to play internal Court politics, leaving him frequently in dissent, but instead to play for history, seeking to etch his originalism philosophy into American law. " ISBN:9780743296496 Author:Bruce Allen Murphy

Brief description Till the Sun Grows Cold: A Mother's Compelling Memoir of the Life of her Daughter Maggie McCune was born in India during the last vestiges of the British Raj. Her daughter, Emma, whose passion for Africa led her to aid work in Sudan where she fell in love with and married a guerrilla commander of the Sudan People's Liberation Army, died in a car accident when only 29 and expecting her first baby. TILL THE SUN GROWS COLD weaves together their stories: the bereaved mother trying to make sense of her daughter's brief, colorful existence through Emma's writing and diaries, and discovering much about herself as she revisits their shared and separate pasts. ISBN:9780747261421 Author:Maggie Mccune