The Failure of Felix Frankfurter

There is, unfortunately, no way one can predict whether a person appointed to the Supreme Court will be a great justice or a mediocre one. The nomination of John Marshall, for example, evoked numerous complaints about his lack of ability. The Philadelphia Aurora characterized him as more distinguished as a rhetorician and sophist than as a lawyer and statesman, and the Senate, in fact, delayed its confirmation vote for a week hoping President John Adams would change his mind. When Woodrow Wilson appointed Louis D. Brandeis to the Court in 1916, pillars of the bar crowded into the Senate judiciary sub-committee hearings to denounce Brandeis as unfit to sit on the nation\u27s highest court

Book Review: Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land. by Robert A. Burt.

Book review: Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land. By Robert A. Burt. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1988. Pp. 165. Reviewed by: Melvin I Urofsky

Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women\u27s Rights

One of the more interesting, and at times more strident, debates in recent years is between a faction of the feminist coalition, proposing new and harsher methods of eliminating pornography and of punishing those who produce and purvey it, and civil libertarians, including many other feminists, who oppose such measures primarily on First Amendment grounds. The debate extends well beyond the cloistered halls of academe, and is far from arcane or hypothetical