Download or read book Democratic Justice Felix Frankfurter the Supreme Court and the Making of the Liberal Establishment written by Brad Snyder and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court justice and champion of twentieth-century American liberal democracy. The conventional wisdom about Felix Frankfurter—Harvard law professor and Supreme Court justice—is that he struggled to fill the seat once held by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Scholars have portrayed Frankfurter as a judicial failure, a liberal lawyer turned conservative justice, and the Warren Court’s principal villain. And yet none of these characterizations rings true. A pro-government, pro-civil rights liberal who rejected shifting political labels, Frankfurter advocated for judicial restraint—he believed that people should seek change not from the courts but through the democratic political process. Indeed, he knew American presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, advised Franklin Roosevelt, and inspired his students and law clerks to enter government service. Organized around presidential administrations and major political and world events, this definitive biography chronicles Frankfurter’s impact on American life. As a young government lawyer, he befriended Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and Holmes. As a Harvard law professor, he earned fame as a civil libertarian, Zionist, and New Deal power broker. As a justice, he hired the first African American law clerk and helped the Court achieve unanimity in outlawing racially segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education. In this sweeping narrative, Brad Snyder offers a full and fascinating portrait of the remarkable life and legacy of a long misunderstood American figure. This is the biography of an Austrian Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States at age eleven speaking not a word of English, who by age twenty-six befriended former president Theodore Roosevelt, and who by age fifty was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers. It is the story of a man devoted to democratic ideals, a natural orator and often overbearing justice, whose passion allowed him to amass highly influential friends and helped create the liberal establishment.
Download or read book Felix Frankfurter written by Melvin I. Urofsky and published by Twayne Publishers. This book was released on 1991 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination of the work, life, & thought of an influential Supreme Court judge. Contains detailed chronology.
Download or read book The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter written by H. N. Hirsch and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2014-07-06 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recognized, fascinating, and much-cited classic of judicial biography and Supreme Court insight is now available in a quality ebook edition—featuring active contents, linked notes, proper formatting, and a fully-linked Index. Felix Frankfurter was perhaps the most influential jurist of the 20th century—and one of the most complex men ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Mysteries and apparent contradictions abound. A vibrant and charming friend to many, why are his diaries so full of vitriol against judicial colleagues, especially Douglas and Black? An active Zionist, why did he so zealously enjoy the company of Boston Brahmins, whose snobbery he detested? Most puzzling of all: why did someone known before his appointment to the Court as a civil libertarian—even a radical—become our most famous and persistent advocate for austere judicial restraint? In answering these and other questions, this pathbreaking biography of Frankfurter explores the personality of the man as a key to understanding the Justice. Harry Hirsch sees in Frankfurter's fascinating and complex persona a clue to the biggest mystery of all: the contrast between the brilliant and ambitious young immigrant rising by his intellect and charm to leadership in U.S. academic and political life; and the judge, equally brilliant, but increasingly isolated, embittered, and ineffective. "Hirsch's well-written book ... dispels the contradictory image that has long mystified students of Felix Frankfurter. His portrait is unvarnished, yet scrupulously fair. Revealed is a consummate manipulator of public men and policy. No future biographer can safely ignore the brilliant biographical work." — Alpheus Thomas Mason, Princeton University "Hirsch's carefully constructed and supported psychological analysis of Justice Frankfurter gives us an exciting look at the inner workings of the Supreme Court." — Martin Shapiro, University of California, Berkeley A new addition to the Legal History & Biography Series from Quid Pro Books. This is an authorized and unabridged digital republication of the acclaimed book first published by Basic Books.
Download or read book Justices Presidents and Senators written by Henry Julian Abraham and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how United States presidents select justices for the Supreme Court, evaluates the performance of each justice, and examines the influence of politics on their selection.
Download or read book Oliver Wendell Holmes A Life in War Law and Ideas written by Stephen Budiansky and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Consistently gripping.… [I]t’s possessed of a zest and omnivorous curiosity that reflects the boundless energy of its subject.” —Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor Oliver Wendell Holmes escaped death twice as a young Union officer in the Civil War. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. During his nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, he wrote a series of opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and ending the Court’s reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms. As a pioneering legal scholar, Holmes revolutionized the understanding of common law. As an enthusiastic friend, he wrote thousands of letters brimming with an abiding joy in fighting the good fight. Drawing on many previously unpublished letters and records, Stephen Budiansky offers the fullest portrait yet of this pivotal American figure.
Download or read book Scorpions written by Noah Feldman and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the careers and constitutional visions of four U.S. Supreme Court Justices appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America’s leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented, tall-tale Westerner who narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed. Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in common. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of poverty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius. Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson began as close allies and friends of FDR. But the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. Scorpions tells the story of these four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself. Praise for Scorpions “Smart and engaging.” —New York Times Book Review “Full of high-stakes intellectual drama.” —Washington Post “A first-rate work of narrative history that succeeds in bringing the intellectual and political battles of the post-Roosevelt Court vividly to life.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The House of Truth written by Brad Snyder and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-05 with total page 825 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1912, a group of ambitious young men, including future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and future journalistic giant Walter Lippmann, became disillusioned by the sluggish progress of change in the Taft Administration. The individuals started to band together informally, joined initially by their enthusiasm for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign. They self-mockingly called the 19th Street row house in which they congregated the "House of Truth," playing off the lively dinner discussions with frequent guest (and neighbor) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. about life's verities. Lippmann and Frankfurter were house-mates, and their frequent guests included not merely Holmes but Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, Herbert Croly - founder of the New Republic - and the sculptor (and sometime Klansman) Gutzon Borglum, later the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument. Weaving together the stories and trajectories of these varied, fascinating, combative, and sometimes contradictory figures, Brad Snyder shows how their thinking about government and policy shifted from a firm belief in progressivism - the belief that the government should protect its workers and regulate monopolies - into what we call liberalism - the belief that government can improve citizens' lives without abridging their civil liberties and, eventually, civil rights. Holmes replaced Roosevelt in their affections and aspirations. His famous dissents from 1919 onward showed how the Due Process clause could protect not just business but equality under the law, revealing how a generally conservative and reactionary Supreme Court might embrace, even initiate, political and social reform. Across the years, from 1912 until the start of the New Deal in 1933, the remarkable group of individuals associated with the House of Truth debated the future of America. They fought over Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence; the dangers of Communism; the role the United States should play the world after World War One; and thought dynamically about things like about minimum wage, child-welfare laws, banking insurance, and Social Security, notions they not only envisioned but worked to enact. American liberalism has no single source, but one was without question a row house in Dupont Circle and the lives that intertwined there at a crucial moment in the country's history.
Download or read book A Well Paid Slave written by Brad Snyder and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-09-25 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “captivating”* look at how center fielder Curt Flood's refusal to accept a trade changed Major League Baseball forever. After the 1969 season, the St. Louis Cardinals traded their star center fielder, Curt Flood, to the Philadelphia Phillies, setting off a chain of events that would change professional sports forever. At the time there were no free agents, no no-trade clauses. When a player was traded, he had to report to his new team or retire. Unwilling to leave St. Louis and influenced by the civil rights movement, Flood chose to sue Major League Baseball for his freedom. His case reached the Supreme Court, where Flood ultimately lost. But by challenging the system, he created an atmosphere in which, just three years later, free agency became a reality. Flood’s decision cost him his career, but as this dramatic chronicle makes clear, his influence on sports history puts him in a league with Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. *The Washington Post
Download or read book Cardozo written by Andrew L. Kaufman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, unarguably one of the most outstanding judges of the twentieth century, is a man whose name remains prominent and whose contributions to the law remain relevant. This first complete biography of the longtime member and chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals and Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States during the turbulent years of the New Deal is a monumental achievement by a distinguished interpreter of constitutional law. Cardozo was a progressive judge who understood and defended the proposition that judge-made law must be adapted to modern conditions. He also preached and practiced the doctrine that respect for precedent, history, and all branches of government limited what a judge could and should do. Thus, he did not modernize law at every opportunity. In this book, Kaufman interweaves the personal and professional lives of this remarkable man to yield a multidimensional whole. Cardozo's family ties to the Jewish community were a particularly significant factor in shaping his life, as was his father's scandalous career--and ultimate disgrace--as a lawyer and judge. Kaufman concentrates, however, on Cardozo's own distinguished career, including twenty-three years in private practice as a tough-minded and skillful lawyer and his classic lectures and writings on the judicial process. From this biography emerges an estimable figure holding to concepts of duty and responsibility, but a person not without frailties and prejudice.
Download or read book Justice and Faith written by Greg Zipes and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frank Murphy was a Michigan man unafraid to speak truth to power. Born in 1890, he grew up in a small town on the shores of Lake Huron and rose to become Mayor of Detroit, Governor of Michigan, and finally a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. One of the most important politicians in Michigan’s history, Murphy was known for his passionate defense of the common man, earning him the pun “tempering justice with Murphy.” Murphy is best remembered for his immense legal contributions supporting individual liberty and fighting discrimination, particularly discrimination against the most vulnerable. Despite being a loyal ally of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when FDR ordered the removal of Japanese Americans during World War II, Supreme Court Justice Murphy condemned the policy as “racist” in a scathing dissent to the Korematsu v. United States decision—the first use of the word in a Supreme Court opinion. Every American, whether arriving by first class or in chains in the galley of a slave ship, fell under Murphy’s definition of those entitled to the full benefits of the American dream. Justice and Faith explores Murphy’s life and times by incorporating troves of archive materials not available to previous biographers, including local newspaper records from across the country. Frank Murphy is proof that even in dark times, the United States has extraordinary resilience and an ability to produce leaders of morality and courage.
Download or read book Law and Politics written by Felix Frankfurter and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book My Brief Career written by Harry Mount and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Brief Career has all the horror of a Dickensian tragedy and all the charm of Bridget Jones' Diaries. An expose of what goes on behind the ancient walls of London's inns of court, this fascinating story dares to reveal the grim secrets of one of England's most archaic institutions . . . This is a book for everyone who has ever though they might want to become a lawyer.
Download or read book Richard Posner written by William Domnarski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Great Dissenter written by Peter S. Canellos and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of an American hero who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to help enshrine our civil rights and economic freedoms. Dissent. No one wielded this power more aggressively than John Marshall Harlan, a young union veteran from Kentucky who served on the US Supreme Court from the end of the Civil War through the Gilded Age. In the long test of time, this lone dissenter was proven right in case after case. They say history is written by the victors, but that is not Harlan's legacy: his views--not those of his fellow justices--ulitmately ended segregation and helped give us our civil rights and our economic freedoms. Derided by many as a loner and loser, he ended up being acclaimed as the nation's most courageous jurist, a man who saw the truth and justice that eluded his contemporaries. "Our Constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens," he wrote in his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, one of many cases in which he lambasted his colleagues for denying the rights of African Americans. When the court struck down antitrust laws, Harlan called out the majority for favoring its own economic class. He did the same when the justices robbed states of their power to regulate the hours of workers and shielded the rich from the income tax. When other justices said the court was powerless to prevent racial violence, he took matters into his own hands: he made sure the Chattanooga officials who enabled a shocking lynching on a bridge over the Tennessee River were brought to justice. In this monumental biography, prize-winning journalist and bestselling author Peter S. Canellos chronicles the often tortuous and inspiring process through which Supreme Courts can make and remake the law across generations. But he also shows how the courage and outlook of one man can make all the difference. Why did Harlan see things differently? Because his life was different, He grew up alongside Robert Harlan, whom many believed to be his half brother. Born enslaved, Robert Harlan bought his freedom and became a horseracing pioneer and a force in the Republican Party. It was Robert who helped put John on the Supreme Court. At a time when many justices journey from the classroom to the bench with few stops in real life, the career of John Marshall Harlan is an illustration of the importance of personal experience in the law. And Harlan's story is also a testament to the vital necessity of dissent--and of how a flame lit in one era can light the world in another. --
Download or read book Marriage Equality written by William N. Eskridge, Jr. and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the marriage equality debate in the United States, praised by Library Journal as "beautifully and accessibly written. . . . An essential work.” As a legal scholar who first argued in the early 1990s for a right to gay marriage, William N. Eskridge Jr. has been on the front lines of the debate over same‑sex marriage for decades. In this book, Eskridge and his coauthor, Christopher R. Riano, offer a panoramic and definitive history of America’s marriage equality debate. The authors explore the deeply religious, rabidly political, frequently administrative, and pervasively constitutional features of the debate and consider all angles of its dramatic history. While giving a full account of the legal and political issues, the authors never lose sight of the personal stories of the people involved, or of the central place the right to marry holds in a person’s ability to enjoy the dignity of full citizenship. This is not a triumphalist or one‑sided book but a thoughtful history of how the nation wrestled with an important question of moral and legal equality.
Download or read book Louis D Brandeis written by Melvin I. Urofsky and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a young lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Louis Brandeis, born into a family of reformers who came to the United States to escape European anti-Semitism, established the way modern law is practiced. He was an early champion of the right to privacy and pioneer the idea of pro bono work by attorneys. Brandeis invented savings bank life insurance in Massachusetts and was a driving force in the development of the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Reserve Act, and the law establishing the Federal Trade Commission. Brandeis witnessed and suffered from the anti-Semitism rampant in the United States in the early twentieth century, and with the outbreak of World War I, became at age fifty-eight the head of the American Zionist movement. During the brutal six-month congressional confirmation battle that ensued when Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1916, Brandeis was described as “a disturbing element in any gentlemen’s club.” But once on the Court, he became one of its most influential members, developing the modern jurisprudence of free speech and the doctrine of a constitutionally protected right to privacy and suggesting what became known as the doctrine of incorporation, by which the Bill of Rights came to apply to the states. In this award-winning biography, Melvin Urofsky gives us a panoramic view of Brandeis’s unprecedented impact on American society and law.
Download or read book The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment written by Randy E. Barnett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A renowned constitutional scholar and a rising star provide a balanced and definitive analysis of the origins and original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Adopted in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment profoundly changed the Constitution, giving the federal judiciary and Congress new powers to protect the fundamental rights of individuals from being violated by the states. Yet, according to Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick, the Supreme Court has long misunderstood or ignored the original meaning of the amendmentÕs key clauses, covering the privileges and immunities of citizenship, due process of law, and the equal protection of the laws. Barnett and Bernick contend that the Fourteenth Amendment was the culmination of decades of debates about the meaning of the antebellum Constitution. Antislavery advocates advanced arguments informed by natural rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the common law. They also utilized what is today called public-meaning originalism. Although their arguments lost in the courts, the Republican Party was formed to advance an antislavery political agenda, eventually bringing about abolition. Then, when abolition alone proved insufficient to thwart Southern repression and provide for civil equality, the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted. It went beyond abolition to enshrine in the Constitution the concept of Republican citizenship and granted Congress power to protect fundamental rights and ensure equality before the law. Finally, Congress used its powers to pass Reconstruction-era civil rights laws that tell us much about the original scope of the amendment. With evenhanded attention to primary sources, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment shows how the principles of the Declaration eventually came to modify the Constitution and proposes workable doctrines for implementing the key provisions of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
