Editor’s Note: Joan Biskupic has covered the Supreme Court since 1989. Previously the Supreme Court reporter for The Washington Post, she is the legal affairs correspondent for USA Today, a frequent panelist on PBS’s Washington Week, and the author of the new biography American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

wowOwow: What is your impression of Sonia Sotomayor? How do you think she’ll influence the trajectory of the Supreme Court?

Joan Biskupic: Supreme Court justices tend to be a staid bunch, and a new justice typically sits back and watches for a while to get a feel for the place. But Justice Sotomayor has quickly shown herself to be an exuberant force and out there — in every way. She jumps in early and often during Supreme Court arguments. She points her finger at the lawyer at the lectern. She loves bright, red nail polish on those fingers, by the way. Off the bench, pounding the marble halls in her high heels, she exudes an over-caffeinated, workaholic way. She’s a New Yorker to the core. One of the highlights for her so far was throwing out the first pitch at a Yankees game. She misses NYC and her condo, which she hasn’t given up, misses the better takeout and faster nightlife. She has compensated a bit by mamboing with movie stars at galas down here (check out YouTube). 

Now, as to your second question, assessing Justice Sotomayor’s trajectory on the law is tougher. During her confirmation hearings, she portrayed herself as someone who straightforwardly, even narrowly, applied the law. On the Supreme Court, she is likely to feel freer to take bolder stands. I expect her to be generally liberal. But we’re too early in her first term to know what she will do. She has issued no opinion yet. She has, however, settled herself with the left-wing and senior liberal Justice John Paul Stevens in urging greater scrutiny of some death-row appeals. But simply being the first Latina on the nation’s highest court is bringing her heaps of public attention at this point.

wOw: There is now a large contingent of New Yorkers on the Supreme Court: Sotomayor hails from the Bronx, Scalia from Queens, Ginsburg from Brooklyn. How will this affect the social dynamic between the judges?

JB: Yes, the New Yorkers have something going, and thank goodness for the energy they bring. Justice Scalia, as you may know, has an outsized personality, shaped partly by his childhood in Queens, a place he has deemed determinative. He has referred to his neighborhood as his "little platoon," in the vein of essayist Edmund Burke, who wrote, "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections." Justice Ginsburg is just as intense about Brooklyn, and certainly Justice Sotomayor feels her identity was shaped in the Bronx. Ginsburg, while far more soft-spoken than Scalia and Sotomayor, is equally persistent with searing questions that get to the core of a dispute. This New York threesome is pretty formidable. Since we’re not too far past this year’s World Series, I’ll mention that Samuel Alito, a more mild-mannered justice who grew up in Trenton, is a die-hard Phillies fan. It was brutal during the oral arguments earlier this month when his team was losing to the Yanks and those three New Yorkers (joined by Buffalo-born Chief Justice John Roberts) were — as usual — dominating the Q and A.

wOw: Your new book, American Original, is a biography of Justice Antonin Scalia. Why/how did you choose Scalia as a subject? What are his most important contributions to the Supreme Court?