We see these two men serving together for two momentous decades, the leaders of the Court's liberal and conservative factions. We come to know them, their characters, their personalities, their beliefs.
"Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., was both a radical egalitarian and a prime mover on the United States Supreme Court. From 1956 to 1990 - through the Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist eras - he effected both judicial and social change via decisions on racial desegregation, pornography, the application of the Bill of Rights to the states, privacy, and abortion. Brennan's stamp is on nearly every contemporary American social issue. A Justice for All, the first biography of Justice Brennan, gathers his considerable achievements in the context of his times and his life." "Brennan had been the original "stealth" nominee to the United States Supreme Court. Having served eight years as a state court judge in New Jersey, Brennan was a total unknown on the national stage when President Eisenhower limited his search for a new justice to a Northeastern Catholic currently serving on a state court. In a rancorous confirmation hearing that foreshadowed events of the eighties and nineties, Brennan tangled with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Taking his place on a Supreme Court bench surrounded by such towering figures as Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William Douglas, and John Harlan, Brennan observed, "I felt a little like the mule at the Kentucky Derby."" "But in a career that would span one-third of a century, Brennan proved to be one of the most visionary and influential justices in the history of the Supreme Court. Not content merely to interpret the Constitution, Brennan rewrote American law in the fields of obscenity, criminal rights, affirmative action, and privacy." "This account of the life of an extremely private and little-understood man brings the reader face to face with the clash of intellectual forces that created the landmark rulings of the Warren court. In the midst of these colliding giants was an unpresuming lawyer from Newark who took Warren's broad concepts and wrote them into law; who convinced a firebrand like William O. Douglas, that, at times, it paid to compromise; and who willingly braved personal and professional confrontations with his former Harvard University law professor, Felix Frankfurter." "In his three years of research, author Kim Isaac Eisler utilized the private papers of Justices Brennan, Douglas, Harlan, Warren, and Black, among others; interviewed dozens of former Brennan clerks; and found childhood friends and onetime law partners to reveal what lit the fire inside this history-making judicial activist." "A Justice for All is the remarkable tale of a man who operated within the marble walls of the Supreme Court with the consummate skills of a dealmaker, creating majorities, writing laws, and all the while steering clear of political fire. In so doing, he succeeded in changing American law and society."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The 233-year story of how the American people have taken an imperfect constitution—the product of compromises and an artifact of its time—and made it more democratic Who wrote the Constitution? That’s obvious, we think: fifty-five men in Philadelphia in 1787. But much of the Constitution was actually written later, in a series of twenty-seven amendments enacted over the course of two centuries. The real history of the Constitution is the astonishing story of how subsequent generations have reshaped our founding document amid some of the most colorful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life. It’s a story of how We the People have improved our government’s structure and expanded the scope of our democracy during eras of transformational social change. The People’s Constitution is an elegant, sobering, and masterly account of the evolution of American democracy. From the addition of the Bill of Rights, a promise made to save the Constitution from near certain defeat, to the post–Civil War battle over the Fourteenth Amendment, from the rise and fall of the “noble experiment” of Prohibition to the defeat and resurgence of an Equal Rights Amendment a century in the making, The People’s Constitution is the first book of its kind: a vital guide to America’s national charter, and an alternative history of the continuing struggle to realize the Framers’ promise of a more perfect union.
“With Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen has built, brick by brick, an airtight case against the Supreme Court of the last half-century...Cohen’s book is a closing statement in the case against an institution tasked with protecting the vulnerable, which has emboldened the rich and powerful instead.” —Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate A revelatory examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years. In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair. A triumph of American legal, political, and social history, Supreme Inequality holds to account the highest court in the land and shows how much damage it has done to America’s ideals of equality, democracy, and justice for all.
David E. Marion offers a careful review of Brennan's opinions that clarifies his defense of libertarian dignity and illustrates the profound political and constitutional impact of Brennan's opinions on public discourse and government policy.
When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration—to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen’s work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America’s largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.
This compelling work of historical non-fiction focuses on the progeny of the famous New York Times v. Sullivan Supreme Court Decision. It examines how Justice Brennan nurtured and developed the constitutional law of defamation and related claims. It provides the authoritative historical account of how an important body of constitutional law came to be. The Progeny offers fresh insights with respect to both what the law means and the process by which it was formulated.