The Importance of Scholarship to Law School Excellence

As we have learned from Dan Coquillette, Bob Kaczorowski, and John Sexton, access to substantial funding is undoubtedly a prerequisite for a law school to enjoy excellence. Funding, that is, is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for excellence. Something else—intellectual vision—is also required

John Marshall and Felix Frankfurter: An Icon and a Disappointment?

This article shows how Chief Justice John Marshall first developed the doctrine of judicial restraint in Marbury v. Madison to assure the public that the Supreme Court would not engage in politically oriented judicial review as colonial courts had in holding Parliament’s 1765 Stamp Act unconstitutional. Justice Felix Frankfurter, in contrast, adopted judicial restraint differently—by reading the scholarship of James Bradley Thayer. This article also shows that Frankfurter did not abandon his commitment to judicial restraint when during his years on the bench it began to serve conservative purposes rather than the progressive purposes it had once served