About The Mortal Court

Why this site exists

I started this site because I wanted to know the Supreme Court as people, not as a building. You cannot understand American history without the Constitution, and for more than two centuries the Constitution has been in the keeping of a small, changing group of men and women: 116 of them so far. Some were great. Some were not. All of them were products of their time, and a surprising number of them are hard to get to know.

Every one of the 116 has a profile here, built around the same four questions. How did they get to the Court? What did they do once they were there? Which decisions are they remembered for? And if you want to go further, where should you go next?

That last question turned out to be the hardest one. Some justices have a shelf of biographies. Others, including some who mattered a great deal, have never had a biographer at all. I think that gap is worth naming out loud, one justice at a time, and 27 justices are still waiting.

What you will find here

The profiles came first, and the rest grew out of them. The annotated bibliography now runs to 1,356 works, 1,320 of them with a note on what each one is good for, and the Free Library pulls out the 523 you can read online for nothing. The History of the Court tells the institution’s story era by era. Voting records built from the Supreme Court Database cover 108 justices, and the methodology page explains exactly how those figures are made.

Then there are the lists, 21 of them, each answering a question people actually ask: who held each seat, which justices voted together, where they went to law school, who might be nominated next, and which justice a request for a stay from your state goes to first.

For the modern Court there is something more: a growing number of justices now have a full biographical chapter. The model is the set of volumes Leon Friedman and Fred Israel edited in 1969, a life in about ten pages, and the aim is a chapter that would not look out of place in their books. The chapters started with the newest justice and are working backward through the Court, one at a time.

How it is made

I have not read every book on this site. No one could. This is a researched guide, not a reading diary. Each reading list comes from mapping what has been written about a justice: the books and articles, what reviewers made of them, and the judgment of the historians who know that justice best. Where I have read a book myself, the page says so.

The rule I care about most is simple. Every quotation, date and link is checked against a source before it goes up. When something cannot be checked, it comes out. “Could not establish” is an answer this site is willing to print, and more than once it has turned out to be the most interesting thing on the page.

I’m Jim McGinnis. I am not a lawyer or a scholar. I do something else entirely for a living, and this is my hobby: an independent project I build because I enjoy it and because I learn something every time I go down one of these rabbit holes. I would like it to become the most useful single guide to the people who have sat on the Court, honest about what is good, honest about what is missing, and honest about how it was put together.

Get in touch

Spotted a mistake, or know a book I’ve missed? I’d like to hear about it.

Jim McGinnis

Also see: Best Presidential Biographies.