Daily Read: Lithwick on Murphy on Scalia

Dahlia Lithwick highlights the problematics of religion in her review in The Atlantic of the new biography of Justice Antonin Scalia, Scalia: A Court of One, by Bruce Allen Murphy. 

Lithwick highlights the Supreme Court's recent decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway upholding the constitutionality of  Christian prayers at a town board meeting and the upcoming decision in Hobby Lobby on the claims of a for-profit corporation to an exemption from the federal requirement that employer insurance coverage include contraception benefits. 

She is very complimentary of the biography:

In Bruce Allen Murphy, Scalia has met a timely and unintimidated biographer ready to probe. A professor of civil rights at Lafayette College, Murphy refuses to be daunted by the silence that surrounds most discussions about religion and the Court. In his view, understanding one of the most dazzling and polarizing jurists on the Supreme Court entails, above all, examining the inevitably murky relationship between judicial decision making and religious devotion.

Indeed, she writes

Murphy does not shrink from adjudicating Scalia’s dueling public claims: that separating faith from public life is impossible and, at the same time, that he himself has done just that on the Court.

From Lithwick's review, A Court of One is  a must-read this summer. But Lithwick's review is also a must-read; she conjectures that "Murphy misses the moral of his own story."