Breaking News

Book Reviews

By on Oct 22, 2012 at 10:45 am
The following is a series of questions posed by Ronald Collins to Jeffrey Toobin on the occasion of the publication of  The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court (Doubleday, 2012). Welcome Jeff.  Thank you for taking the time to participate in this Question and Answer exchange for our readers.  And congratulations on the publication of your latest book.   Question: In your book you rely on not-for-attribution interviews with Justices and with more than forty of their law clerks.  Can you tell us how many sitting Justices, if any, you interviewed?   Answer:  A majority of all living Justices (active and retired).

By on Oct 16, 2012 at 9:39 am
On October 9, Basic Books released Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, a new book by Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, and Stuart Taylor, Jr., a legal journalist.  In their book, Sander and Taylor argue that race-based admissions preferences for minority students lead to “mismatch” between students and universities:  as a result of race-based preferences, students are admitted to more selective schools than they otherwise would be based on their academic credentials alone; once enrolled at these more prestigious schools, the students fall behind and are less likely to finish.  This “mismatch” effect, the authors contend, then cascades down all tiers of higher education, with the effects becoming more pronounced at each successive tier. The authors have generously agreed to answer a few questions about the book for SCOTUSblog.

By on Sep 17, 2012 at 4:24 pm
In the spring of 2003, the phone on Seth Waxman’s desk rang.  “Will you accept a call from federal prison?” the caller asked.  Waxman sighed.  It might have been his fifth prisoner call that day.  As the former Solicitor General of the United States and a prominent member of the Supreme Court bar, he was on the must-contact list for those looking for representation before the Court.  In almost all of these cases, Waxman wanted to help, but he was just one person.  And – whether fair or not – petitions by prisoners stood little chance of capturing the Court’s attention. But this call, it would turn out, was different.  This call was from a prisoner named John Fellers.  And not only did Fellers have a case for Waxman, but the Court had already granted this prisoner’s petition.  The one he had filed pro se.  The one for which he had filled out an in forma pauperis (“IFP”) request.  The one for which he now had no lawyer, because his “lawyer” at the cert. stage had been a fellow inmate, a guy whose prison job was working in the law library, a guy who had no college education and no expertise in anything but robbing banks.

By on Aug 24, 2012 at 11:27 am
In a 1966 interview with The Baltimore Sun, Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) said he left Baltimore in the 1930s and was “glad to be rid of it forever.”  Thirty-nine years after that interview, Maryland state lawmakers renamed the Baltimore-Washington International airport after Marshall. Former Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer thought the naming inappropriate given Marshall’s dig at Baltimore. Thurgood Marshall, Jr., however, saw it otherwise: “For someone who applied life lessons as he did, it would be impossible simply to walk away from a life and a community where the seeds of his future success had been so carefully planted by his family.”  As it turned out, the name stuck, and one of the men who helped make it so was a University of Maryland law professor named Larry Gibson. He’s now about to release a book on the famed civil rights lawyer and jurist from Baltimore.

By on Aug 23, 2012 at 12:41 pm
From 1978 to 2008, Linda Greenhouse covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.    In addition to teaching at Yale Law School, where is she is currently a senior research scholar, Linda also continues to write a bi-weekly column for the “Opinionator” blog of the Times.   She is also the author of many law review articles, the book Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey, and the co-author (with Reva Siegel) of Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling.  Linda was gracious enough to answer a few questions about her latest book, The U.S. Supreme Court:  A Very Short Introduction, which was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press as part of its “Very Short Introductions” series.

By on Mar 12, 2012 at 10:13 am
In December 1833, the American Monthly Review commented on a newly published book by Joseph Story.  By that time the fifty-four-year-old Supreme Court Justice had written or edited some twelve books. These works included a treatise on bills of exchange, a treatise on pleading, yet another on pleading and assumpsit, commentaries on the law of bailments, a biography, and even a book of poetry titled The Power of Solitude: A Poem in Two Parts.  And he had a new work, a three-volume set with a long title: Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States; With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before the Adoption of the Constitution. Of this book, the American Monthly reviewer wrote:
[T]he work is a rare union of patience, brilliancy, and acuteness, and . . . [contains] all the learning on the Constitution brought down to the latest period, so as to be invaluable to the lawyer, statesman, politician, and in fine, to every citizen who aims to have a knowledge of the great Charter under which he lives.
That review was among the first of many such laudatory reviews of a treatise that went on to become canonical in the history of American constitutional law. Before he died in 1845, Joseph Story published another twenty-one books after his Commentaries.

By on Dec 13, 2011 at 12:07 pm
Clare Cushman, Courtwatchers: Eyewitness Accounts in Supreme Court History, Rowman & Littlefield  (Lanham, Md., 2011), 312 pp. (cloth), $35.00, foreword by Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. When you’re going to serve on the Court . . . for the rest of your productive days you accustom yourself to the institution like you do to the institution of marriage, and you realize that you can’t be in a brawl every day and still get any satisfaction out of life. -- Chief Justice Earl Warren (1972) I have read my share of books on the Supreme Court and its history.  But I have never read a book quite like Courtwatchers.  Remarkably researched and engagingly written, this book (replete with twenty-seven pictures/photographs) is nothing short of a treasure trove of all sorts of wonderful, informative, rancorous, touching, and sometimes amusing stories about the Court, its history, and its personnel – the Justices, their families, the Court reporters, the clerks, the lawyers, the staff, the journalists who wrote about it, and all others who had business with the Esteemed Institution.  It has been a long while since I read a book on the Court and learned so much . . . without nodding off. (I should say that I was similarly impressed years ago when I read a different kind of book by Elder Witt; I refer to her Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court.)

By on Nov 18, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Who will write a biography of Judge Henry J. Friendly? . . .  He seems to have been a fascinating and brilliant figure. – Orin Kerr (2008) Judge Richard Posner called him the “greatest federal appellate judge of his time.” And while time has taken some of the luster off his renown, his name is still revered in some of the highest quarters. For example, he has been cited by name in more than 125 Supreme Court opinions – including in Martin v. Franklin Capital Corp. (2005), the first opinion for the Court by Chief Justice John Roberts. Since then, he has been mentioned sixteen times in the pages of the United States Reports in other opinions by the Chief Justice (six more) and Justices Alito, Kennedy, Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter, in cases touching upon everything from federal jurisdiction and securities law to habeas corpus and Fourth Amendment law.  Additionally, his fame is kept alive by many of his former law clerks, including the Chief Justice (1979-80) and federal judges Michael Boudin (1964–1965), Merrick Garland (1977-78), and A. Raymond Randolph (1969-70), among others.  And Chief Justice Warren Burger once said of him that he could not identify “any judicial colleague more highly qualified to have come to the Supreme Court of the United States than Henry Friendly.”

By on Nov 3, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Earlier this month, retired Justice John Paul Stevens sat down with one of his former clerks, Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher, for an interview.  The occasion was the Justice's publication of Five Chiefs, his memoir on his time at the Court and his relationships with five different Chief Justices.  During their interview, the Justice discussed several topics – such as the Court’s decision-making process, political gerrymandering, the confirmation process, and the death penalty – that have not received much attention in other interviews about the book, and which are likely to be of substantial interest to our readers.  The lightly edited transcript of their interview follows.

By on Oct 18, 2011 at 10:25 am
Ronald K.L. Collins is the Harold S. Shefelman scholar at the University of Washington School of Law.  She covered the Supreme Court for nearly three decades for The New York Times. During that time she published some 2,800 articles for the Times and covered twenty-nine Terms of the Court.  If you do the math on the number of articles she did and the length of those articles, it comes out to the equivalent of twenty-one average-size books – imagine that, twenty-one volumes on the Court’s work!