Brown v. Board of Education is widely recognized as one of the US Supreme Court's most important decisions in the twentieth century. Robert H. Jackson, an associate justice on the case, is generally considered one of the Court's most gifted writers. Though much has been written about Brown, citing the writing and remarks of the justices who participated in the 1954 decision, comparatively little has been said about Jackson or his unpublished opinion, which is sometimes even mistakenly taken as a dissenting opinion. This book visits Brown v. Board of Education from Jackson's perspective and, in doing so, offers a reinterpretation of the justice's thinking, and of the Supreme Court's decision making, in a ruling that continues to reverberate through the nation's politics and public life. Weaving together judicial biography, legal history, and judicial politics, Justice Robert H. Jackson's Unpublished Opinion in Brown v. Board provides a nuanced look at constitutional interpretation, and the intersection of law and politics, from inside the mind of a justice, within the context of a Court deciding a seminal case. Through an analysis of six drafts of Jackson's unpublished concurring opinion, David M. O'Brien explores the justice's evolving thoughts on relevant issues at critical moments in the case. His retelling of Brown presents a new view of longstanding arguments confronted by Jackson and the other justices over “original intent” versus a “living Constitution,” the role of the Court, and social change and justice in American political life. The book includes the final draft of Jackson's unpublished opinion, as well as the Warren Court's opinions in Brown and in Bolling v. Sharpe, for comparison, along with a timeline of developments and decision making leading to the Court's landmark ruling.

Classical rhetorical techniques can enhance the persuasiveness of Supreme Court opinions by making their language clear, lively, and memorable. This book focuses on three techniques—“invention” (creation of arguments), “arrangement” (organization), and “style” (word choice)—in the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert Jackson, Hugo Black, William Brennan, and Antonin Scalia, respectively. The justices featured here contributed to the Court’s rhetorical legacy in different ways, but all five rejected the magisterial opinion style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in favor of a more personal and conversational format. As a result, their opinions have endured, and even modern readers who cannot recall the justices’ names understand and embrace the ideas expressed in their legal writings and apply those ideas to current debates. Practicing lawyers, professors, and students can use this book to study legal writing techniques and make their own writing more persuasive.

The Final Keystone By: John Kevin Crowley Every case in the history of Jurisprudence involves three things: Trust, Betrayal, and Accountability. Through his education, studies, and observations and experiences, author John Kevin Crowley has learned the interconnection of history, law, philosophy, and religion with the human condition. How that relationship has played out in human history leading to present day is a focus of The Final Keystone. This treatise is the story of us and the source of the lessons left unlearned. It is a reminder of what does not work and how what does work must be ever vigilantly guarded.

This book commemorates a place and a time in American law teaching, but more importantly, an outlook: the common law tradition. That outlook was empirical and tolerant. These values were carried into expression by a group of people who were not part of a cult or faction nor ruled by the herd instinct. Now in paperback, The Common Law Tradition is a collective portrait of five scholars who epitomize the tradition.The focus is Chicago in the 1960s. The five figures considered--Edward H. Levi, Harry Kalven, Jr., Karl Llewellyn, Philip Kurland, and Kenneth Culp Davis--did much to broaden the perspectives of the legal academy. Levi made use of sociology, economics, and comparative law. Kalven collaborated with sociologists on the Jury Project and with economists on tax law and auto compensation plans. Llewellyn's commitment to empirical research underpinned his work on the Uniform Commercial Code. Kurland's approach to constitutional law was highlighted by his insistence on the relevance of legal history. Davis was an energetic comparativist in his work on administrative law. What distinguished these Chicagoans is that their work was practical and rooted in the law, and hence yielded concrete applications. The group's diversity, the tolerant atmosphere in which they taught and wrote, and the attachment of its individual members to empirical approaches differentiate them from today's legal scholars and make their ideas of continuing importance.

Stuart Banner's The Most Powerful Court in the World is an authoritative history of the United States Supreme Court from the Founding era to the present. Not merely a history of the Court's opinions and jurisprudence, it is also a rich account of the Court in the broadest sense--of the sorts of people who become justices and the methods by which they are chosen, of how the Court does its work, and of its relationship with other branches of government. Rather than praising or criticizing the Court's decisions, Banner makes the case that one cannot fully understand the decisions without knowing about the institution that produced them.

Over the course of its history, the United States Supreme Court has emerged as the most powerful judiciary unit the world has ever seen. Paul D. Moreno’s How the Court Became Supreme offers a deep dive into its transformation from an institution paid little notice by the American public to one whose decisions are analyzed and broadcast by major media outlets across the nation. The Court is supreme today not just within the judicial branch of the federal government but also over the legislative and executive branches, effectively possessing the ability to police elections and choose presidents. Before 1987, nearly all nominees to the Court sailed through confirmation hearings, often with little fanfare, but these nominations have now become pivotal moments in the minds of voters. Complaints of judicial primacy range across the modern political spectrum, but little attention is given to what precisely that means or how it happened. What led to the ascendancy of America’s highest court? Moreno seeks to answer this question, tracing the long history of the Court’s expansion of influence and examining how the Court envisioned by the country’s Founders has evolved into an imperial judiciary. The US Constitution contains a multitude of safeguards to prevent judicial overreach, but while those measures remain in place today, most have fallen into disuse. Many observers maintain that the Court exercises legislative or executive power under the guise of judicial review, harming rather than bolstering constitutional democracy. How the Court Became Supreme tells the story of the origin and development of this problem, proposing solutions that might compel the Court to embrace its more traditional role in our constitutional republic.

An annual peer-reviewed law journal covering the legal implications of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States. Since it first appeared in 1960, the Supreme Court Review (SCR) has won acclaim for providing a sustained and authoritative survey of the implications of the Court’s most significant decisions. SCR is an in-depth annual critique of the Supreme Court and its work, analyzing the origins, reforms, and modern interpretations of American law. SCR is written by and for legal academics, judges, political scientists, journalists, historians, economists, policy planners, and sociologists.