Henry Friendly is frequently grouped with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand as the best American jurists of the twentieth century. In this first, comprehensive biography of Friendly, Dorsen opens a unique window onto how a judge of this caliber thinks and decides cases, and how Friendly lived his life.

In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers. For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges--most notably Justice Antonin Scalia--needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating "canons of constructions" (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.

An incisive biography of the Supreme Court's enigmatic Chief Justice, taking us inside the momentous legal decisions of his tenure so far. John Roberts was named to the Supreme Court in 2005 claiming he would act as a neutral umpire in deciding cases. His critics argue he has been anything but, pointing to his conservative victories on voting rights and campaign finance. Yet he broke from orthodoxy in his decision to preserve Obamacare. How are we to understand the motives of the most powerful judge in the land? In The Chief, award-winning journalist Joan Biskupic contends that Roberts is torn between two, often divergent, priorities: to carry out a conservative agenda, and to protect the Court's image and his place in history. Biskupic shows how Roberts's dual commitments have fostered distrust among his colleagues, with major consequences for the law. Trenchant and authoritative, The Chief reveals the making of a justice and the drama on this nation's highest court.

Judge Richard Posner is one of the great legal minds of our age, on par with such generation-defining judges as Holmes, Hand, and Friendly. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the principal exponent of the enormously influential law and economics movement, he writes provocative books as a public intellectual, receives frequent media attention, and has been at the center of some very high-profile legal spats. He is also a member of an increasingly rare breed-judges who write their own opinions rather than delegating the work to clerks-and therefore we have unusually direct access to the workings of his mind and judicial philosophy. Now, for the first time, this fascinating figure receives a full-length biographical treatment. In Richard Posner, William Domnarski examines the life experience, personality, academic career, jurisprudence, and professional relationships of his subject with depth and clarity. Domnarski has had access to Posner himself and to Posner's extensive archive at the University of Chicago. In addition, Domnarski was able to interview and correspond with more than two hundred people Posner has known, worked with, or gone to school with over the course of his career, from grade school to the present day. The list includes among others members of the Harvard Law Review, colleagues at the University of Chicago, former law clerks over Posner's more than thirty years on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and even other judges from that court. Richard Posner is a comprehensive and accessible account of a unique judge who, despite never having sat on the Supreme Court, has nevertheless dominated the way law is understood in contemporary America.

Provides a rare glimpse into the life of an outrageously human, fearlessly black, openly angry and profanely outspoken comedic genius whose humble beginnings as the child of a prostitute helped shaped him into one of the most influential and outstanding performers of our time.

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes. And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.

When David Souter was nominated by President Bush to the Supreme Court, he cited John Marshall Harlan as his model. It was an interesting choice. Admired by conservatives and deeply respected by his liberal brethren, Harlan was a man, as Justice William Brennan lamented, whose "massive scholarship" has never been fully recognized. In addition, he was the second Harlan to sit on the Court, following his grandfather--also named John Marshall Harlan. But while his grandfather was an outspoken supporter of reconstruction on a conservative court, the younger Harlan emerged as a critic of the Warren Court's liberal expansion of civil liberties. Now, in the first biography of this important but neglected jurist, Tinsley Yarbrough provides a detailed account of Harlan's life, from his privileged childhood to his retirement and death. Yarbrough examines the forces and events which shaped the Justice's jurisprudence--his early life and often complex family relationships, education at Princeton and Oxford, his work as a prosecutor during Prohibition, Republican Party activities, wartime service in the Army Air Force, and years as one of the nation's preeminent corporate lawyers (a career culminating in his defense of the du Pont brothers in the massive DuPont-GM antitrust suit). The book focuses, however, on Harlan's years on the high bench. Yarbrough weaves together discussions of the Justice's relations with his brethren, clerks, and staff, an examination of Harlan's role in the decision-making process on the Court, and an analysis of his jurisprudence. The Justice's approach to constitutional interpretation exalted precedent, deference to governmental power, and narrow decisions closely tied to case facts; but he also accepted an evolving, creative model of constitutional construction which permitted expansive readings of constitutional rights. Yarbrough's details Harlan's close relationship with Justice Frankfurter, showing how--despite their friendship and alliance--Harlan strongly marked out his own position, both personally and judicially, on the Warren and Burger courts. And he examines the substance and significance of his dissents in such famous cases as Miranda and the Pentagon Papers. Intensively researched, smoothly written, and incisively argued, Yarbrough's biography offers an absorbing account of the life and career of a great dissenter, hailed by admirers as a "lawyer's lawyer" and a "judge's judge." Coming at a time when the high court has begun to adopt many of Harlan's principles, this account provides an essential perspective on the Court, civil liberties, and a pivotal figure in the history of both.