Book Review: Samuel Alito’s ‘So Ordered’ Defends the Practical Use of Originalism

For Supreme Court justices, the written word is the central tool of their trade. It is how they exercise power; how they persuade colleagues, future justices, and academics; and how they instruct lower courts and the bar as to what the law is. It is therefore natural that they should write books and articles to defend the thinking that goes into their written opinions.

Justice Samuel Alito is the latest of the justices to write a book. So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, hit stores on Tuesday. It’s been the subject of his recent round of media interviews, including my interview on the book’s release date (published in two parts here and here). Twenty years into his tenure on the Court and 36 years into his career as a federal appeals judge, Alito has given a lot of speeches and written a vast number of judicial opinions, but he has never before published a book. So Ordered is a collection of 19 of his speeches, more than half of them delivered within the past decade, occasionally presented with short updates on the topic in the years since the speech was given. Even the title has a double meaning, as the customary conclusion of judicial orders is also used to mean that he has attempted to arrange the speeches into a coherent narrative of his judicial philosophy. A third, unstated meaning is that Alito believes in an ordered world and means to explain the proper place of a judge in that world.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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For Supreme Court justices, the written word is the central tool of their trade. It is how they exercise power; how they persuade colleagues, future justices, and academics; and how they instruct lower courts and the bar as to what the law is. It is therefore natural that they should write books and articles to defend the thinking that goes into their written opinions.

Justice Samuel Alito is the latest of the justices to write a book. So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, hit stores on Tuesday. It’s been the subject of his recent round of media interviews, including my interview on the book’s release date (published in two parts here and here). Twenty years into his tenure on the Court and 36 years into his career as a federal appeals judge, Alito has given a lot of speeches and written a vast number of judicial opinions, but he has never before published a book. So Ordered is a collection of 19 of his speeches, more than half of them delivered within the past decade, occasionally presented with short updates on the topic in the years since the speech was given. Even the title has a double meaning, as the customary conclusion of judicial orders is also used to mean that he has attempted to arrange the speeches into a coherent narrative of his judicial philosophy. A third, unstated meaning is that Alito believes in an ordered world and means to explain the proper place of a judge in that world.