Soon after Ed Meese was sworn in as attorney general in early 1985, he organized a group within the Justice Department whose purpose was to advise him, and ultimately President Reagan, on who would be the best candidates to select for the Supreme Court, in the event seats opened. There were about 20 of us, and we looked at roughly 20 prospects, most of them federal judges. We reviewed their careers but we were especially interested in whether they espoused the president’s judicial philosophy—Reagan wanted justices who “would interpret the law, not make it,” as he often put it.
We read a lot of opinions and speeches and articles by our 20 prospects. And we debated their relative merits. It didn’t take us long to decide that there were two exceptionally able candidates who were strong exponents of the president’s approach to judging. One was Robert Bork and the other was Antonin Scalia. Either man, we thought, could someday rank among the few greats who have served on the Court.
So in 1986, when Chief Justice Warren Burger indicated his intention to retire, our group was able to advise Meese without delay. Meese presented both names to the president, recommending that he name Associate Justice William Rehnquist to take Burger’s seat, and at the same time announce either Bork or Scalia as the new associate justice. Reagan interviewed each of the two men, and picked Scalia.
Our group was thrilled. We would have been thrilled with either. Serving almost thirty years, Scalia was indeed of the nation’s greatest justices. (Bork would have been, but that’s another story.) Scalia’s accomplishments in the law are manifold, not least that he became the justice who pioneered the effort to put the text back into statutory law and the Constitution back into constitutional law.
