The Annotated Bibliography
Every work cited anywhere on this site, in one alphabet — and what each one is for.
1356 works · 1041 of them books · 1320 annotated · revised October 2, 2026
This is the whole reading list in one place: the 1041 books, and the articles, chapters, memoirs, correspondence, papers, dissertations and manuscript collections cited on the 116 justice shelves and in the History of the Court reading room. One entry per record, in Chicago author–title style. The note under an entry is the assessment written for that work where it sits on the site — 36 of the 1356 have no note, and those appear with their citation alone rather than with something written to fill the space. Court opinions are cited on each justice’s own page and are not listed here.
Take it with you
The same 1356 works, set as a document. Grouped is the one to read — thematic first, then justice by justice. By author is the one to check a reference in.
Every work, A to Z
By author, the way the By Author PDF is ordered.
Abe Fortas Papers (MS 858). New Haven: Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, 1935–1983.
The papers, at Yale: 100.75 linear feet in 204 boxes covering the law professor, the New Dealer, the Arnold & Porter partner, the presidential adviser, the justice, and the patron of music, with an unpublished typescript among the writings.
Find a copy →Abraham, Henry J. Justices, Presidents, and Senators: A History of the U.S. Supreme Court Appointments from Washington to Bush II. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
The standard history of the appointments, nomination by nomination from Washington to Bush II: why each was picked, what the Senate did about it, and whether the justice repaid the president's expectations. Began life as Justices and Presidents in 1974; the fifth edition adds Roberts and Alito, and this site's failed-nominations page walks ground Abraham mapped first.
Abraham, Henry J. “President Jefferson's Three Appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States: 1804, 1807, and 1807.” Journal of Supreme Court History 31, no. 2 (2006): 141–154.
The fullest modern account of Jefferson's three appointments — Johnson, Livingston, Todd — and what the president hoped each would do to Marshall's Court.
Find a copy →Ackerman, Bruce, Charles Fried, Norman Dorsen, et al. “Centennial Conference in Honor of Justice John Marshall Harlan.” New York Law School Law Review 36, no. 1. 1991.
The major collective assessment of Harlan — Ackerman's 'Common Law Constitution of John Marshall Harlan' and Fried's 'Conservatism of Justice Harlan' are the landmark essays, with contributions from his clerks and critics.
Read it →Adler, Jonathan H., ed. Business and the Roberts Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Whether the Roberts Court is a pro-business Court, tested by empirical and doctrinal chapters on securities, antitrust, labour, preemption, environmental regulation, class actions and commercial speech, in a volume edited by Jonathan Adler; Oxford, July 2016, 354 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Ainsworth, Scott H., and John Anthony Maltese. “National Grange Influence on the Supreme Court Confirmation of Stanley Matthews.” Social Science History 20, no. 1 (1996): 41–62.
The dedicated study of the closest confirmation in Supreme Court history — 24 to 23, in 1881, after the Grange and anti-railroad forces nearly sank the corporate lawyer Matthews.
Find a copy →Albert J. Beveridge Collection of John Marshall Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1776-1844.
Not Marshall's papers but the ones Beveridge gathered to write about him: 300 items in seven containers, 2.8 linear feet, 1776 to 1844 with the bulk from 1795.
Read it →Alexander, De Alva Stanwood. A Political History of the State of New York, vol. 1 (1774–1832). New York: Henry Holt, 1906.
The standard party history of the state, which Dunne's bibliography says 'cannot be written without some mention of him' and 'will contain occasional references': the Clintons, Livingstons, Burr and Hamilton through the elections that Brockholst's family helped decide.
Read it →Allen, Austin. "Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Obscurity of John Catron." Vanderbilt Law Review 62, no. 2 (2009): 491–518.
From the 2009 Vanderbilt symposium — printed immediately ahead of Finkelman's McLean piece — the clearest short account of the man, the career, and the reasons for the obscurity.
Read it →Allen, Austin. Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006.
Austin Allen's account of what the Taney Court had built before 1857: a body of doctrine he calls Jacksonian jurisprudence that protected slavery, balanced federal power against state sovereignty, promoted economic development and underpinned an emerging corporate order all at once.
Find a copy →Allen, Francis A. “Chief Justice Vinson and the Theory of Constitutional Government: A Tentative Appraisal.” Northwestern University Law Review 49 (1954): 3.
The appraisal at the head of the Northwestern memorial number, by the professor (then at Harvard) who had been Vinson's law clerk for two years, and the one Kurland's review of 1954 names as the counterweight to his own low estimate: 'Professor Francis A. Allen who served Vinson so well as a law clerk for two years has recently written an evaluation of his Chief's legal thought.'
Find a copy →Alschuler, Albert W. Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
The case against Holmes, argued in full.
Read it →Alsop, Joseph, and Turner Catledge. The 168 Days. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1938.
The court-packing fight as two newspapermen wrote it up the next year: the 168 days from Roosevelt's message of February 5, 1937 to the Senate's 70–20 vote of July 22 sending the bill back to committee, still cited by the historians of the crisis.
Read it →Anderson, Judith Icke. William Howard Taft: An Intimate History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.
The psychological and personal life — a candid portrait of Taft's marriage, his ambition (much of it Nellie's), and the weight, literal and figurative, he carried through public life.
Read it →Angelillo, Joseph. “The ‘Unrepentant Secessionist’: The Nomination of L.Q.C. Lamar and the Retreat from Reconstruction.” Journal of Supreme Court History 46, no. 1 (2021): 42–61.
The only substantial Lamar scholarship since Murphy's 1973 biography — and a sharper-eyed one: the 1888 confirmation of a Confederate drafter of Mississippi's secession ordinance read as a milestone in the North's retreat from Reconstruction, not merely the reconciliation JFK celebrated.
Find a copy →Annis, David Leslie. "Mr. Bushrod Washington: Supreme Court Justice on the Marshall Court." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1974.
Ariens, Michael S. “A Thrice-Told Tale, or Felix the Cat.” Harvard Law Review 107 (1994): 620.
The unsettling rejoinder: Ariens's argument that Frankfurter shaped — perhaps invented — the Roberts memorandum narrative to serve his own account of 1937.
Read it →Arkes, Hadley. The Return of George Sutherland: Restoring a Jurisprudence of Natural Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
The natural-law philosopher Hadley Arkes's provocative rehabilitation of the leading 'Four Horseman' — an argument that Sutherland's jurisprudence of natural rights deserves revival, not scorn.
Read it →Arnold, Richard S., Harold H. Koh, Donald P. Lay and Karen N. Moore. “Dedication to Justice Harry A. Blackmun.” Hamline Law Review 8, no. 1 (January 1985).
Chief Judge Donald Lay's survey of the eleven Eighth Circuit years is the reason to want it — that is the stretch Greenhouse treats thinnest — and Harold Koh's fifty-four pages on the equal protection of aliens is the longest thing in it.
Arthur J. Goldberg Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1793–1995.
The Library's collection, 78,000 items in 296 containers and 120.7 linear feet, of which the Court is one series among many: the finding aid says 'the Supreme Court File represents Goldberg's tenure as an associate justice on the Court from 1962 to 1965,' with a case file of 'draft opinions, memoranda, and notes,' and adds that 'additional Supreme Court files of Goldberg are in the Northwestern University School of Law Library.'
Read it →Ashe, Samuel A., ed. Biographical History of North Carolina from Colonial Times to the Present. Greensboro, NC: C. L. Van Noppen, 1905–17.
Read it →Atkinson, David N. Leaving the Bench: Supreme Court Justices at the End. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999.
The study of how justices leave — death, resignation, decline, denial — and the book that gives this site its mortal-court thread.
Read it →Atkinson, David N. “From New Deal Liberal to Supreme Court Conservative: The Metamorphosis of Justice Sherman Minton.” Washington University Law Quarterly 1975: 361.
The puzzle Friedman and Israel's chapter set out, taken up as a question in role theory: the repository's abstract promises 'his development from politician to jurist' and 'a theory of judicial role' to explain the justice.
Read it →Atkinson, David N. “Justice Sherman Minton and the Protection of Minority Rights.” Washington and Lee Law Review 34 (1977): 97.
The race cases read whole, twenty years after the retirement, by the political scientist who made Minton his subject: Barrows, Terry, the conference of December 12, 1953 as Ulmer recovered it from the justices' notes, and the line the record draws, that he 'generally protected minority interests from irrational discrimination only when there was clear and persuasive evidence of direct state action.'
Read it →Avery, Michael, ed. We Dissent: Talking Back to the Rehnquist Court: Eight Cases That Subverted Civil Liberties and Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Eight contributors, among them Erwin Chemerinsky, Tracey Maclin, Jamin Raskin, David Rudovsky, Marjorie Cohn, Susan Serrano, Abbe Smith and Eva Paterson, writing the dissents they say should have been written in eight Rehnquist Court decisions, edited by Michael Avery of Suffolk University Law School; New York University Press, 2009, 237 pages. Not read.
Bader, William D., and Frank J. Williams. Unknown Justices of the United States Supreme Court. William S. Hein, 2011.
Profiles of the Court's obscure justices by William D. Bader and Frank J. Williams, asking what they meant to the Court and to legal culture and why they stayed obscure; William S. Hein, 2011, 139 pages. Not read.
Bader, William D., and Roy M. Mersky, comps. The First One Hundred Eight Justices. Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein, 2004.
The 1978 statistical study of the first hundred justices brought up to a hundred and eight, 173 pages from Hein in 2004 with a preface by Richard S. Arnold; the original is on this shelf. No copy found online. Not read.
Bader, William D., and Roy M. Mersky. “Justice Levi Woodbury: A Reputational Study.” Journal of Supreme Court History 23, no. 2 (1998): 129–142.
Bader, William D., Henry J. Abraham & James B. Staab. "The Jurisprudence of Levi Woodbury." Vermont Law Review 18, no. 2 (1994): 261–312.
The fullest modern assessment, from a team including Henry Abraham, the dean of judicial-appointments scholarship.
Find a copy →Baier, Paul R. “Edward Douglass White: Frame for a Portrait.” Louisiana Law Review 43, no. 4 (1983).
The best of the Louisiana historiography — Baier's evocative portrait of the Confederate veteran, sugar planter, and devout Catholic who became the first sitting associate justice elevated to Chief.
Read it →Bailey, Mark Warren. Guardians of the Moral Order: The Legal Philosophy of the Supreme Court, 1860–1910. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004.
The Gilded Age Court read through the moral philosophy its justices were taught: Claeys's Claremont Review notice credits it with unearthing unstudied speeches, treatises and college curricula, and with answering the Progressive reading, Beard to Horwitz, that the Court protected property for economic reasons.
Bailey, Michael A., and Forrest Maltzman. The Constrained Court: Law, Politics, and the Decisions Justices Make. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Michael Bailey of Georgetown and Forrest Maltzman of George Washington on whether legal doctrine actually constrains the justices, measured against the political preferences the attitudinal model relies on; Princeton, September 2011, 216 pages, an honourable mention for the American Political Science Association's 2012 C. Herman Pritchett Award. Not read.
Find a copy →Bair, Robert R. & Robin D. Coblentz. "The Trials of Mr. Justice Samuel Chase." Maryland Law Review 27, no. 4 (1967).
A compact legal history of the proceedings that produced the impeachment — the Fries and Callender trials, Chase's treatment of counsel and juries, the Baltimore grand-jury charge, and the Senate case.
Read it →Baird, Vanessa A. Answering the Call of the Court: How Justices and Litigants Set the Supreme Court Agenda. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007.
Vanessa Baird on where the Court's docket comes from: when the justices signal interest in an area, discrimination, free expression, welfare, immigration or economic regulation, litigants supply a larger and more significant set of cases there four or five years later; Virginia, March 2007, 240 pages, in the Constitutionalism and Democracy series. Not read.
Find a copy →Baker, Leonard. Back to Back: The Duel between FDR and the Supreme Court. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
The 1937 duel retold at book length thirty years on, 311 pages with a short bibliography, by the journalist who went on to write the lives of John Marshall and of Brandeis and Frankfurter.
Read it →Baker, Leonard. Brandeis and Frankfurter: A Dual Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
The two intertwined lives told as one — the mentor and the protégé, the era's most prominent Jewish justices, bound by ideology, ambition, and a remarkable collaboration.
Read it →Baker, Leonard. John Marshall: A Life in Law. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
Read it →Baker, Liva. Felix Frankfurter: A Biography. New York: Coward-McCann, 1969.
The first full narrative life, written for a general reader four years after Frankfurter's death — brisk, sympathetic, and still a good story, though it predates the opening of the papers and the modern scholarship.
Read it →Baker, Liva. The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
A big, readable one-volume life and times, strong on the Boston world that produced Holmes and on his long marriage to Fanny Dixwell.
Read it →Baldwin, Henry. A General View of the Origin and Nature of the Constitution and Government of the United States. Philadelphia: J. C. Clark, 1837.
The strangest book ever published by a sitting justice: a sprawling, self-financed treatise deducing the Constitution's nature from colonial history, written to justify his "middle course" between Marshall's nationalism and the compact theory of the nullifiers.
Find a copy →Ball, Dewi Ioan. The Erosion of Tribal Power: The Supreme Court's Silent Revolution. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016.
Dewi Ioan Ball on the silent revolution he finds in fifty years of Indian-law decisions, the incremental stripping of tribal authority over non-Indians from Williams v. Lee to Nevada v. Hicks, read from seven justices' private papers; Oklahoma, 2016, 311 pages. Not read.
Ball, Howard, and Phillip J. Cooper. Of Power and Right: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and America's Constitutional Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
The dual study of the two New Deal appointees who drove the rights revolution and then fell out — Douglas the restless individualist beside Black the disciplined textualist.
Read it →Ball, Howard. A Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America. New York: Crown Publishers, 1999.
A full scholarly biography by a political scientist, published on the heels of Williams's and more focused on the law.
Read it →Ball, Howard. Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
The fullest modern scholarly biography after Newman's — Howard Ball is sharp on the contradictions: the former Klansman who became the Court's fiercest defender of civil liberties, the literal-minded textualist of ferocious will.
Read it →Banks, Christopher P., and John C. Blakeman. The U.S. Supreme Court and New Federalism: From the Rehnquist to the Roberts Court. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.
Christopher Banks and John Blakeman on the federalism decisions from the Rehnquist Court's revival of state sovereignty into the Roberts Court, the Affordable Care Act case included; Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2012, 348 pages. Not read.
Banner, Stuart. The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
Stuart Banner's one-volume institutional history of the Court from 1789 to the present, how it acquired and kept its authority, who the justices were and how they were chosen, and how it works inside; Oxford, November 2024, 672 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Barbar, James. The Honorable Eighty-Eight. New York: Vantage Press, 1957.
Vantage Press, New York, 1957: 124 pages on the eighty-eight justices by the author's count, catalogued under the Court and its judges. Not seen, and no copy found online.
Barbas, Samantha. Newsworthy: The Supreme Court Battle over Privacy and Press Freedom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.
Samantha Barbas of Buffalo on the Hill family, held hostage in 1952 and then turned into a novel, a play and a film, whose privacy suit against Life became Time, Inc. v. Hill and set the newsworthiness standard; Stanford, January 2017, 348 pages, written from the papers of Nixon, who argued the case. Not read.
Barkow, Rachel Elise. Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025.
Rachel Barkow of NYU on six decisions that opened the way to pretrial detention, coercive plea bargaining, disproportionate sentences and racial disparity, and the originalist case for overruling them; Harvard, March 2025, 320 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Barnes, Catherine A. Men of the Supreme Court: Profiles of the Justices. New York: Facts on File, 1978.
Twenty-six profiles of the justices who sat between 1945 and 1978, Black to Whittaker in alphabetical order, from the Facts on File reference house, with a short bibliography.
Read it →Barnes, William Horatio. The Supreme Court of the United States: A Series of Biographies. Washington, DC: W.H. Barnes & Co., 1877.
A Washington publisher's 1877 collective biography of the Court, with an introduction by Justice Miller and fifteen portraits; the sketches of the nine sitting justices first ran as pages 65 to 118 of Barnes's The American Government (1875), which the Library of Congress has in full text.
Read it →Barnhart, Bill, and Gene Schlickman. John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010.
The fullest biography of Stevens, and the best starting point for a long and independent life.
Read it →Barnwell, Robert W., Jr. “Rutledge, ‘The Dictator.’”. Journal of Southern History 7 (1941): 215.
The standard study of Rutledge's extraordinary wartime governorship — the near-absolute powers South Carolina handed him as the British closed in, which earned him the nickname and made him the most powerful executive in revolutionary America.
Barrett, Amy Coney. Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and the Constitution. New York: Sentinel, 2025.
Barrett's own reflective account of the Court, constitutional interpretation, and her path to the bench, published in 2025 — the closest thing to a self-portrait from the newest conservative justice.
Barrett, Amy Coney. “Originalism and Stare Decisis.” Notre Dame Law Review 92, no. 5 (2017): 1921.
Barrett's most cited academic article, from her years as a law professor, and essential for understanding the mind she brought to the bench.
Read it →Barry, Richard. Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942.
Barry's study, though based on wide research and at times colorful, ultimately feels light rather than penetrating.
Read it →Barton, Benjamin H. The Credentialed Court: Inside the Cloistered, Elite World of American Justice. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.
Benjamin Barton of Tennessee shows how narrow the justices' backgrounds have become, nearly all of them Harvard or Yale graduates and former appellate judges or professors, through studies of every justice from Jay to Barrett; Encounter, March 2022, 360 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Bates, Ernest Sutherland. The Story of the Supreme Court. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1936.
A popular one-volume history from 1936, the eve of the court-packing fight, reissued in 1938 'with a prefatory conclusion' once the fight was over, and reprinted by Rothman in 1982.
Read it →Baude, William. The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket. New York University Journal of Law and Liberty 9 (2015): 1–45.
The article that named the thing: forty-five pages in the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty in 2015 on the orders and summary decisions the Court issues outside its argued docket, called there “a range of orders and summary decisions that defy its normal procedural regularity.” Vladeck credits this piece with coining the phrase. Free from Chicago Unbound; abstract and citation read, not the article.
Read it →Baum, Lawrence. Ideology in the Supreme Court. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Lawrence Baum on how ideology reaches specific votes, through shared understandings among political elites and the justices' attitudes toward social groups rather than deduction from principle, tested on the three areas that realigned between 1910 and 2013; Princeton, May 2017, 288 pages, and winner of the 2018 Pritchett Award. Not read.
Find a copy →Baxter, Maurice G. Daniel Webster and the Supreme Court. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966.
The Marshall and Taney Courts from the advocate's lectern: Webster's cases before the Court, 1966, with a bibliography.
Read it →Baynes, Thomas E., Jr. “Yankee from Georgia: A Search for Justice Woods.” Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook 1978: 31–42.
The sole standalone study of Woods ever published — Baynes's search for the transplanted Ohio Union general who became a New South justice and wrote almost nothing memorable in six years.
Read it →Beard, Charles A. The Supreme Court and the Constitution. New York: Macmillan, 1912.
Beard's 127-page study of 1912 on the origins of judicial review, grown from a Political Science Quarterly article: the Convention of 1787, judicial control before ratification, and Marbury; reissued in 1962 with Alan Westin's introduction, and free to read.
Read it →Belknap, Michal R. The Supreme Court and Criminal Procedure: The Warren Court Revolution. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2011.
The documentary volume on the criminal-procedure revolution, in CQ Press's series on the Court's power: Michal Belknap on notification of rights and interrogation, search and seizure, and counsel for the indigent, with the opinions set beside law review articles, press editorials and police manuals from before and after the rulings.
Find a copy →Belknap, Michal R. The Supreme Court under Earl Warren, 1953–1969. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.
The Warren years in one volume of the South Carolina chief-justiceships series, school cases to the criminal-procedure revolution; the press quotes Urofsky calling it 'far and away the best single volume we have on the Warren Court.'
Belknap, Michal R. The Vinson Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
The only book-length treatment of the Vinson Court as a court — the loyalty-security cases, Youngstown, and the run-up to Brown that Vinson did not live to decide.
Find a copy →Belknap, Michal R. “Mr. Justice Pitney and Progressivism.” Seton Hall Law Review 16, no. 2 (1986): 381–423.
The leading modern study of Pitney — Belknap's case that the author of Coppage was no simple reactionary but a New Jersey progressive whose labor decisions were more mixed, and more principled, than the caricature.
Read it →Belko, William S. Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America: An Old Republican in King Andrew's Court. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2016.
Strict construction, states' rights, hostility to banks, tariffs, and internal improvements — the creed itself, carried by the Speaker who fought the Missouri Compromise restrictions, presided over Virginia's 1829–30 convention, and was Jackson's deliberate choice to plant the doctrine in Duvall's chair.
Find a copy →Bell, Thomas Rives. The Constitution of Conflict: How the Supreme Court Undermines the Separation of Powers. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2025.
Thomas Rives Bell of Knox College argues the Court should stay out of interbranch disputes that do not touch individual rights, through case studies of the legislative veto, executive agreements, recess appointments and impeachment; Kansas, November 2025, 304 pages. Not read.
Belsky, Martin H., ed. The Rehnquist Court: A Retrospective. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
The Rehnquist Court looked back on, 283 pages of essays from Oxford in 2002 edited by Martin Belsky. No copy found online. Not read.
Bendiner, Robert. “The Law and Potter Stewart: An Interview with Justice Potter Stewart.” American Heritage 35, no. 1 (1983).
The interview people quote, two years after he left the bench: Stewart on labels, on Warren ('sometimes was guided by what he thought was right or wrong rather than by the law'), on obscenity ('It's a very subjective matter'), and on the judge's duty 'to remove from his judicial work his own political or religious or moral or philosophical or social ideas.'
Find a copy →Benedict, Michael Les. The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973.
The standard scholarly account of the 1868 trial, where the ex-justice delivered his second historic performance: Curtis's opening for the defense framed impeachment as a legal proceeding requiring an indictable offense — the theory on which Johnson survived by one vote.
Find a copy →Bent, Silas. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., 1932.
The first full-length life, published in 1932, the year Holmes left the bench, by the journalist Silas Bent (whose other books include Newspaper Crusaders).
Read it →Berman, Daniel M. “Mr. Justice Whittaker: A Preliminary Appraisal.” Missouri Law Review 24 (1959): 1.
The first scholarly look, written after two terms and cited by Friedman and Israel.
Read it →Berman, William C. “Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.” In The Truman Period as a Research Field (1967).
The first item in Friedman and Israel's list, 'on the background to Clark's work on the Court': Berman's survey of civil rights and civil liberties in the Truman years, in the volume Kirkendall edited from the 1966 Truman Library conference, which F&I says covers 'aspects of the history of the Truman administration in which Clark played major roles.'
Read it →Berry, Mary Frances. Stability, Security, and Continuity: Mr. Justice Burton and Decision-Making in the Supreme Court, 1945–1958. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.
The scholarly study of Burton's Court years by the historian Mary Frances Berry, built from his meticulous diaries — a close look at how a modest Ohio Republican actually made decisions across the Vinson and Warren Courts.
Read it →Beth, Loren P. John Marshall Harlan: The Last Whig Justice. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992.
The standard scholarly life — Loren Beth reads Harlan as an old-fashioned Kentucky Whig whose nationalism and moral absolutism made him the Court's lonely conscience on race.
Read it →Beveridge, Albert J. The Life of John Marshall (4 vols.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916–1919.
Magnificent and dated in equal measure: a senator's epic that fixed Marshall's heroic image for the twentieth century, built on prodigious research and an open loathing of Jefferson.
Read it →Bickel, Alexander M. & Benno C. Schmidt Jr. The Judiciary and Responsible Government, 1910–1921 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 9). New York: Macmillan, 1984.
The Holmes Devise volume for the White Court, 1910–1921.
Find a copy →Bickel, Alexander M. The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
The book that named the countermajoritarian difficulty, judicial review's standing quarrel with democratic government, and answered it with the passive virtues: the techniques by which a Court declines to decide.
Read it →Bickel, Alexander M. The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Bickel's 1969 Harvard Law School lectures on the Warren Court, revised for print the year after it ended and reissued by Yale in 1978 with a foreword by Anthony Lewis.
Read it →Bickel, Alexander M., ed. The Unpublished Opinions of Mr. Justice Brandeis: The Supreme Court at Work. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957.
Opinions Brandeis wrote and never delivered, taken from his working papers and set out with commentary by Alexander Bickel, Paul Freund introducing: the Court seen from the drafts that did not issue.
Read it →Binney, Horace. Memorial sketch of Bushrod Washington. Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Son, 1858.
Read it →Biskupic, Joan. American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
The definitive biography, by a veteran Supreme Court journalist.
Find a copy →Biskupic, Joan. Breaking In: The Rise of Sonia Sotomayor and the Politics of Justice. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2014.
The best biography — the veteran Court journalist Joan Biskupic on Sotomayor's rise from a Bronx housing project to the Court, and on the politics of the first Latina justice's appointment.
Read it →Biskupic, Joan. Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences. New York: William Morrow, 2023.
The best single account of the conservative supermajority and how it was built.
Find a copy →Biskupic, Joan. Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice. New York: Ecco, 2005.
The first major biography, by the veteran Court journalist Joan Biskupic — written while O'Connor still sat, and definitive on how the pragmatic Arizonan became the swing vote who decided abortion, affirmative action, and religion for a generation.
Read it →Biskupic, Joan. The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts. New York: Basic Books, 2019.
The definitive biography, by the veteran Court journalist who has chronicled a generation of justices.
Find a copy →Black, Charles L., Jr. The People and the Court: Judicial Review in a Democracy. New York: Macmillan, 1960.
Judicial review in a democracy defended, two years before Bickel's Least Dangerous Branch took up the same question, by the Yale professor who had worked on the Brown briefs at Columbia.
Read it →Black, Hugo L. A Constitutional Faith. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968.
Black's own credo, drawn from his 1968 Carpentier Lectures at Columbia, and the clearest statement of the philosophy that drove him.
Read it →Black, Hugo L. Edited by Irving Dilliard. One Man's Stand for Freedom: Mr. Justice Black and the Bill of Rights — A Collection of His Supreme Court Opinions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963.
Martin and Goehlert list the book but omit Dilliard, which is the one fact about it that matters — an edited collection of opinions is an argument about which opinions count, and Dilliard made it.
Read it →Black, Hugo L. “Inside a Senate Investigation.” Harper's Magazine 172 (February 1936): 275–286.
February 1936: Black is a sitting senator from Alabama running the lobbying investigation that made him nationally famous and feared, and he is writing about it himself, eighteen months before Roosevelt names him to the Court.
Find a copy →Black, Hugo L. “The Bill of Rights.” New York University Law Review 35 (April 1960): 865–881.
Black's 1960 James Madison Lecture, and the closest thing to a manifesto he ever wrote: the argument that the Bill of Rights means what it says, that “no law” means no law, and that the Fourteenth Amendment carried the whole of it against the states.
Black, Hugo L. “There Is a South of Union and Freedom.” Georgia Law Review 2, no. 1 (Fall 1967): 10–15.
Six pages, free from Georgia's repository, and sharper than its length suggests: the Klan-member-turned-incorporationist writing about the South in 1967, in a tribute issue for Judge Elbert Tuttle of the Fifth Circuit — the judge who enforced desegregation — alongside Earl Warren and John Minor Wisdom.
Read it →Black, Hugo L., and Edmond Cahn. “Justice Black and First Amendment ‘Absolutes’: A Public Interview.” New York University Law Review 37 (June 1962): 549–563.
Edmond Cahn asks and Black answers, in public, in 1962 — and it produced the most-quoted exchange in the literature of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech,” and “that is what I believe it means.”
Black, Hugo L., and Elizabeth Black. Mr. Justice and Mrs. Black: The Memoirs of Hugo L. Black and Elizabeth Black. New York: Random House, 1986.
The intimate primary source — Black's own fragments of memoir joined to his wife Elizabeth's candid diaries of the later Court years, with a foreword by Justice Brennan.
Read it →Black, Ryan C., and Ryan J. Owens. The Solicitor General and the United States Supreme Court: Executive Branch Influence and Judicial Decisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Ryan Black and Ryan Owens on the Solicitor General's influence, measured from Justice Blackmun's papers with statistical matching and causal inference, and found at certiorari, at opinion assignment and in the treatment of precedent, with professionalism and objectivity offered as the explanation; Cambridge, April 2012, 181 pages. Not read.
Black, Ryan C., Ryan J. Owens, Justin Wedeking, and Patrick C. Wohlfarth. The Conscientious Justice: How Supreme Court Justices' Personalities Influence the Law, the High Court, and the Constitution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Ryan Black, Ryan Owens, Justin Wedeking and Patrick Wohlfarth measure the justices' conscientiousness from their words and test it across nine stages of the Court's work, from agenda setting to opinion writing; Cambridge, 358 pages, dated 2019 by the Library and 2020 by the publisher. Not read.
Black, Ryan C., Ryan J. Owens, Justin Wedeking, and Patrick C. Wohlfarth. US Supreme Court Opinions and Their Audiences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Ryan Black, Ryan Owens, Justin Wedeking and Patrick Wohlfarth build a measure of opinion clarity and find the Court writing more plainly when facing divided lower courts, weak agencies, less professional legislatures or a hostile public, with clearer opinions producing better compliance; Cambridge, April 2016, 185 pages. Not read.
Black, Ryan C., Timothy R. Johnson, and Justin Wedeking. Oral Arguments and Coalition Formation on the U.S. Supreme Court: A Deliberate Dialogue. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Ryan Black, Timothy Johnson and Justin Wedeking on argument as a means by which the justices monitor each other's positions, read from transcripts between 1998 and 2007 and from the archival notes of Justices Powell and Blackmun, with the information gathered there shaping how opinions are drafted; Michigan, October 2012, 160 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Blackmun, Harry A. “The Marital Deduction and Its Use in Minnesota.” Minnesota Law Review 36, no. 1 (December 1951): 50–64.
Blackmun on estate tax, written in Minneapolis in 1951 while he was a tax and estates lawyer eight years from the Mayo Clinic's general counsel office and twenty-two years from Roe v. Wade.
Read it →Bland, Randall W. Private Pressure on Public Law: The Legal Career of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1973.
An early book-length study, written while Marshall sat and nearly twenty years before he retired: a political scientist's account of the legal career, grown from a Notre Dame thesis, revised in 1993 to carry the story to the end of the Court years.
Read it →Blandford, Linda A., and Patricia Russell Evans, eds. Supreme Court of the United States, 1789–1980: An Index to Opinions Arranged by Justice (2 vols.). Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1983.
Every opinion of every justice from 1789 to 1980, indexed justice by justice in two volumes for the Supreme Court Historical Society: the reference that lets a reader find what a given member of the Court wrote, rather than what the Court decided.
Read it →Blasi, Vincent, ed. The Burger Court: The Counter-Revolution That Wasn't. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
The influential verdict on the Burger Court — a Yale symposium arguing that the Court expected to undo the Warren revolution mostly consolidated it instead.
Read it →Blatchford, Harriet W., comp. The Blatchford Memorial. 1871.
Listed by Martin and Goehlert as one of three Blatchford items, and it is worth being blunt about what it is: a family memorial to the Justice's GRANDFATHER, the Reverend Samuel Blatchford, D.D. (1767–1828) — his autobiography, memoir, obituary and funeral sermon, followed by descendant tables.
Read it →Blaustein, Albert P., and Roy M. Mersky. The First One Hundred Justices: Statistical Studies on the Supreme Court of the United States. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978.
The book behind every “greatest justices” ranking: the 1970 survey in which sixty-five scholars rated the first ninety-six justices — twelve great, fifteen near great, fifty-five average, six below average, eight failures — plus statistical tables on the first hundred. The scheme has been borrowed ever since, Abraham's appointment ratings included.
Read it →Bloom, Lackland H., Jr. Do Great Cases Make Bad Law? New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Lackland Bloom of Southern Methodist tests Holmes's dictum on twenty-two decisions from Marbury to the Affordable Care Act case, asking of each why the Court thought it momentous and whether the doctrine it produced proved workable; Oxford, 2014, 435 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Bloom, Lackland H., Jr. Methods of Interpretation: How the Supreme Court Reads the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Lackland Bloom's descriptive survey of the nine ways the Court reads the Constitution, text, original understanding, tradition and practice, structure, precedent, doctrinal derivation and refinement, consequentialist reasoning and rhetoric, with strong and weak examples of each drawn from the opinions themselves; Oxford, February 2009, 592 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Blue, Frederick J. Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987.
The other modern scholarly biography, and the fullest account of the political Chase.
Read it →Bobelian, Michael. Battle for the Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Forging of the Modern Supreme Court. Tucson, AZ: Schaffner Press, 2019.
Michael Bobelian on the 1968 fight over Fortas's nomination as Chief Justice, the first filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee, Thurmond's use of the obscenity films, and Nixon's turning of the Court into a campaign issue; Schaffner Press, 2019, 475 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Bohm, Robert M. The Past as Prologue: The Supreme Court's Pre-Modern Death Penalty Jurisprudence and Its Influence on the Supreme Court's Modern Death Penalty Decisions. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2012.
Robert Bohm on thirty-nine capital cases decided before Furman v. Georgia and the doctrinal effect they had on the decisions that came after it; Carolina Academic Press, Durham, 2012, 256 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Boles, Donald E. Mr. Justice Rehnquist, Judicial Activist: The Early Years. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1987.
The earliest book-length study of Rehnquist, published the year after he became Chief Justice and two years before Davis's Justice Rehnquist and the Constitution, and titled for its thesis, that the associate-justice years were activism, not restraint.
Read it →Bolick, Clint. David's Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary. Cato Institute, 2007.
Clint Bolick's argument that a passive judiciary is the greater danger to liberty, illustrated from speech, economic-liberty, equal-protection and property claims; Cato Institute, March 2007, 188 pages, by a constitutional litigator. Not read.
Find a copy →Bolick, Clint. Two-Fer: Electing a President and a Supreme Court. Hoover Institution Press, 2012.
Clint Bolick's argument that judicial appointments should weigh heavily in choosing a president, and that recent presidents have grown effective at appointing judges who share their philosophy; Hoover Institution Press, April 2012, 115 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Bollinger, Lee C., and Geoffrey R. Stone, eds. Money, Politics, and the First Amendment: Fifty Years of Supreme Court Decisions and Campaign Finance Reforms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2026.
Fifty years of campaign-finance decisions, Buckley v. Valeo to Citizens United and after, in essays on both sides edited by Lee Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, with Briffault, Abrams, Chemerinsky, Issacharoff, Pildes, Tushnet, Judge Wood and Senators Whitehouse and Klobuchar among the contributors; Oxford, March 2026, 438 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Bolner, James. “Fred M. Vinson: 1890-1938, The Years of Relative Obscurity.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 63 (1965): 3.
The Kentucky years and the House, Louisa to the Court of Appeals, in the state historical society's journal; Friedman and Israel call it 'a routine but useful survey.'
Bolner, James. “Mr. Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson and Racial Discrimination.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 64 (1966): 29.
James Bolner's study of the Chief Justice and the race cases, a year after his survey of Vinson's early life.
Bond, James E. I Dissent: The Legacy of Justice James Clark McReynolds. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1992.
The only book-length study, and a fair-minded one about a man easy to caricature.
Read it →Bowen, Catherine Drinker. Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family. Boston: Little, Brown, 1944.
The famous popular life — Catherine Drinker Bowen's romantic, best-selling biography of Holmes and his family that fixed his image for a generation.
Read it →Boyd, Christina L., Paul M. Collins, Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand. Supreme Bias: Gender and Race in U.S. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023.
Christina Boyd, Paul Collins and Lori Ringhand show from the hearing transcripts that women and nominees of colour are questioned harder and interrupted more; Stanford, October 2023, 290 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Bradbury, James Ware; Walter Chandler. "Memoir of Nathan Clifford" (Maine Historical Society, 1887) & "Nathan Clifford: A Triumph of Untiring Effort" (ABA Journal 11, 1925).
The memorial tradition, as the FJC's bibliography lists it: Bradbury — a former senator who knew him — for the Maine Historical Society, and Chandler (who also wrote the Catron centenary) with the bar's self-made-man framing.
Braden, George D. “Mr. Justice Minton and the Truman Bloc.” Indiana Law Journal 26 (1951): 153.
The first term counted, by a Yale professor writing while it was still warm: Vinson, Burton, Clark and Minton as a bloc, and the rule that 'when the Truman appointees go, they all go together; and as the Truman appointees go, so goes the Court.'
Read it →Bradley, Charles, ed. Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Hon. Joseph P. Bradley, with a Sketch of His Life. Newark, NJ: L. J. Hardham, 1902.
No biography of Bradley has ever been written — this memorial volume, assembled by his son with a life sketch and assessments of his judicial record and dissents, is the closest thing that exists.
Read it →Bradley, Craig, ed. The Rehnquist Legacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
A scholarly assessment of the whole tenure, gathered just after his death — essays on federalism, criminal procedure, religion, and judicial administration that take the measure of a Chief who moved the law steadily rightward and ran the building with quiet efficiency.
Read it →Brandeis, Louis D. Business — A Profession. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1914.
The other 1914 book, the People's Attorney's essays and addresses on business as a calling, from Small, Maynard of Boston; the Library of Congress copy online is the 1925 printing, with Ernest Poole's essay 'Brandeis' in front and notes by Felix Frankfurter, on efficiency, unions, hours, life insurance, trusts, railroads and interlocking directorates.
Read it →Brandeis, Louis D. Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914.
Brandeis's own manifesto against monopoly and 'the curse of bigness' — the muckraking classic on how investment bankers used other people's money to control American industry.
Read it →Brandeis, Louis D. The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis. Edited by Osmond K. Fraenkel and Clarence M. Lewis. New York: Viking Press, 1934.
The collection made while he still sat, 362 pages edited by Osmond K. Fraenkel and Clarence M. Lewis for the Viking Press in 1934, under the phrase that became his label.
Read it →Brennan, William J., Jr. An Address on the Occasion of the Celebration of the Golden Anniversary of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, 1913 to 1963. Harvard Law School, Occasional Pamphlet No. 7 (1963).
The speech at the Bureau's fiftieth-anniversary banquet, printed as a Harvard Law School pamphlet.
Brennan, William J., Jr. An Affair with Freedom: A Collection of His Opinions and Speeches Drawn from His First Decade as a United States Supreme Court Justice. Edited by Stephen J. Friedman. New York: Atheneum, 1967.
The first decade in his own words, opinions and speeches from 1956 to 1966 selected by Stephen J. Friedman for Atheneum in 1967: xv and 384 pages, the reader for the Warren Court's engine before Baker v. Carr and Sullivan were history.
Read it →Brennan, William J., Jr. The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification. 1985.
Brennan's credo, delivered as a 1985 address at Georgetown and the most influential judicial answer to the originalism then ascendant under Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Find a copy →Brennan, William J., Jr. “Constitutional Adjudication.” Notre Dame Lawyer 40 (1965): 559.
The Cardinal O'Hara Lecture at Notre Dame, April 21, 1965, printed in the August number: Brennan on why constitutional cases are not ordinary disputes but contests between individual right and public power, to be decided by applying enduring principles to present conditions, with procedural fairness and human dignity as the tests.
Read it →Brennan, William J., Jr. “Some Aspects of Federalism.” New York University Law Review 39 (1964): 945.
Brennan's address to the Conference of Chief Justices in New York on August 7, 1964, by Robert Post's account of it, aimed at the state judges unsettled by the reapportionment and habeas decisions and setting out how he saw the relation of state and federal authority.
Brennan, William J., Jr. “The Bill of Rights and the States.” New York University Law Review 36 (1961): 761.
The James Madison Lecture at New York University, February 15, 1961, printed in the April number at pages 761 to 778: the first of his two Madison Lectures at New York University, on the subject its title names; the second, in 1986, was 'The Bill of Rights and the States: The Revival of State Constitutions as Guardians of Individual Rights,' 61 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 535.
Brennan, William J., Jr. “The Responsibilities of the Legal Profession.” American Bar Association Journal 54 (1968): 121.
The last item in the Friedman and Israel bibliography, and the only one after the chapter was written: a 1968 piece in the bar's own journal.
Brennan, William J., Jr. “The Supreme Court and the Meiklejohn Interpretation of the First Amendment.” Harvard Law Review 79 (1965): 1.
Brennan's own account, a year after New York Times v. Sullivan and by Lee Bollinger's reading of it, of Alexander Meiklejohn's theory that the First Amendment protects the speech self-government needs, and of how far the Court's decisions had taken it up; twenty pages, the first article of the volume.
Brenner, Saul, and Joseph M. Whitmeyer. Strategy on the United States Supreme Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Saul Brenner and Joseph Whitmeyer's finding that the justices behave less strategically than the literature assumes: departures from outcome-prediction at the certiorari stage, coalition bargaining in fewer than six per cent of cases and most vote fluidity not strategic at all; Cambridge, February 2009, 196 pages. Not read.
Brewer, David J. Address: Two Periods in the History of the Supreme Court. Richmond: Richmond Press, 1906.
Brewer's own history of the Court, twenty-four pages delivered to the Virginia State Bar Association at Hot Springs in August 1906 and printed at Richmond; the Library of Congress has it in its pamphlet collection and no copy has been found online.
Brewer, David J. American Citizenship: Yale Lectures. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902.
Brewer's Yale lectures on the duties of the citizen, 131 pages from Scribner's in 1902, the sitting Justice as public moralist; the companion to his Christian Nation address of three years later.
Read it →Brewer, David J. The United States: A Christian Nation. Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1905.
Brewer's famous Haverford lectures expanding on his Holy Trinity dictum — the canonical primary source for the 'Christian nation' idea from the justice who put the phrase into the U.S. Reports.
Find a copy →Breyer, Stephen. Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Breyer's judicial manifesto, and the clearest statement of the pragmatic philosophy he offered as the alternative to originalism.
Find a copy →Breyer, Stephen. Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk Regulation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
The pre-bench Breyer, the administrative-law scholar — his influential little book on how to make risk regulation rational, a window on the expert, consequences-minded cast of mind he would bring to the Court.
Read it →Breyer, Stephen. Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge's View. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
Breyer's fullest statement of his judicial philosophy — the argument that the Court earns its authority by making the Constitution work for a democratic society, weighing purposes and consequences rather than parsing text alone.
Read it →Breyer, Stephen. Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024.
Breyer's parting argument, written just after his retirement — a direct rebuttal to the textualism and originalism now ascendant on the Court, and the clearest statement of the pragmatic alternative he spent three decades defending.
Find a copy →Breyer, Stephen. The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.
Breyer's last book before retiring, and his answer to a moment of crisis over the Court's legitimacy.
Find a copy →Breyer, Stephen. The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
Breyer's argument that American judges can no longer decide cases in isolation from the wider world — that commerce, security, treaties, and human rights increasingly require attention to foreign and international law.
Find a copy →Bridge, Dave. Pushback: The Political Fallout of Unpopular Supreme Court Decisions. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2024.
Dave Bridge of Baylor on how parties turn unpopular, countermajoritarian decisions, Roe to Dobbs, into electoral momentum; Missouri, March 2024, 367 pages. Not read.
Brisbin, Richard A., Jr. Justice Antonin Scalia and the Conservative Revival. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
The first serious scholarly study of Scalia's method and its place in the conservative legal movement — a close reading of the opinions through his first decade that remains a standard analytical account.
Read it →Brister, E. M. P. Centennial History of the City of Newark and Licking County, Ohio (2 vols.). Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1909.
The fullest life of Woods anyone wrote, and it is a county subscription history.
Read it →Brock, David. Stench: The Making of the Thomas Court and the Unmaking of America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.
David Brock on the making of the Thomas Court, the Federalist Society, the megadonors and the Thomases' ethics, from the author of The Real Anita Hill who has since, by his own later title, become an ex-conservative; Knopf, September 2024, 384 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Brock, David. The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story. New York: Free Press, 1993.
Bestselling 1993 attack on Hill's credibility, arguing she invented the charges — later repudiated by its own author, who said publicly in 2001 that he had lied in it.
Broderick, Vincent L. “Justice Potter Stewart.” North Carolina Central Law Review 12 (1981): 297.
A profile written while he still sat, weeks before the retirement announcement: the brevity, the narrow holdings, the respect for precedent, and the equal-protection record from housing to school desegregation, by a federal district judge.
Find a copy →Brodhead, Michael J. David J. Brewer: The Life of a Supreme Court Justice, 1837–1910. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.
The standard biography and the only full one, from Southern Illinois University Press.
Find a copy →Bronner, Ethan. Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
A Boston Globe correspondent's blow-by-blow of the 1987 Bork fight, built on interviews across the White House, the Justice Department, and the senators who beat him.
Brookhiser, Richard. John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court. New York: Basic Books, 2018.
The most concise and quotable of the modern popular lives — Marshall in a week rather than a month.
Find a copy →Brown, Francis Joseph. The Social and Economic Philosophy of Pierce Butler. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945.
The only book-length study of Butler — a Catholic University monograph on the conservative Minnesota Democrat's philosophy, and the fullest account of the most reticent of the Four Horsemen.
Brown, H. B. "The Dissenting Opinions of Justice Daniel." American Law Review 21, no. 6 (1887): 869–900.
A thirty-page audit of Daniel's dissents, by an author generally identified as Henry Billings Brown — who would join the Court himself in 1891.
Read it →Brown, Steven P. Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2020.
Eight Supreme Court cases that began in Alabama, New York Times v. Sullivan, Gomillion v. Lightfoot and Frontiero v. Richardson among them, with a closing section on the three Alabama-born justices, by Steven Brown of Auburn; Alabama, October 2020, 276 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Brown, Steven P. John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012.
The subtitle is the thesis: a study of circuit riding in the Old Southwest, with McKinley as its exhausted exemplar.
Find a copy →Brown, William Garrott. The Life of Oliver Ellsworth. New York: Macmillan, 1905.
For a century the only full biography, and still valuable: Brown wrote gracefully, worked from materials some of which are no longer easily traced, and fixed the standard narrative of Ellsworth's life.
Read it →Budiansky, Stephen. Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.
The best modern single-volume life — narrative, humane, and unillusioned.
Find a copy →Burford, Anne M., with John Greenya. Are You Tough Enough? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986.
His mother's memoir of the EPA years and the 1983 contempt-of-Congress fight that ended them, written when the future justice was in college; the source of the mother-son exchange the chapter quotes.
Read it →Burger, Warren E. Delivery of Justice: Proposals for Changes to Improve the Administration of Justice. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1990.
The administrator's book: xix and 361 pages of Burger's proposals for the machinery of justice, from court management to the bar, published by West with the College of William and Mary in 1990, four years into the retirement.
Read it →Burger, Warren E. It Is So Ordered: A Constitution Unfolds. New York: William Morrow, 1995.
The last book, published by Morrow in the year of his death: fourteen cases and moments from Marbury to Plessy, told for the general reader, 268 pages; the record's description opens, 'The Constitution of the United States affects the daily life of every American in powerful and often unrecognized ways.'
Read it →Burns, James MacGregor. Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
James MacGregor Burns's charge that the Court assumed a power of review the Constitution never granted and has used it to block reforms mandated by elected majorities, with the 1937 court-packing fight at the centre and proposals to curb the Court at the end; Penguin Press, 2009, 326 pages, by a historian and biographer rather than a lawyer. Not read.
Burt, Robert A. Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
A short, influential meditation on Brandeis and Frankfurter as Jewish outsiders — Burt reads their jurisprudence through assimilation and marginality, arguing that the immigrant's anxiety to belong helped shape Frankfurter's deference to the American majority.
Read it →Burton, David H. Taft, Holmes, and the 1920s Court: An Appraisal. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.
A short double study of Taft and Holmes, who sat together through the 1920s: the two careers set side by side, formative years first, to explain how each decided.
Read it →Burton, Orville Vernon, and Armand Derfner. Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021.
Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner read nearly two hundred cases involving racial minorities from Cherokee removal to Shelby County, and find that the Court protected civil rights only in the window from the 1930s to the early 1970s; Belknap, May 2021, 464 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Butler, Charles Henry. A Century at the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1942.
The memoir of the Court's Reporter of Decisions from 1902 to 1916, volumes 187 to 241 of the United States Reports, published in 1942: the Court of Fuller and White seen from the reporter's desk.
Read it →Byrnes, James F. All in One Lifetime. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958.
Byrnes's autobiography, and a revealing self-portrait of a man at the center of power for four decades.
Find a copy →Byrnes, James F. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947.
Byrnes's insider account of the early Cold War — his eighteen months as Truman's Secretary of State, the fraught Council of Foreign Ministers, and the hardening toward the Soviet Union.
Read it →Calmes, Jackie. Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. New York: Twelve, 2021.
Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles Times on the Kavanaugh confirmation, reported from more than two hundred interviews including new ones with the accusers, and set inside four decades of Republican effort to control the judiciary; Twelve, June 2021, 496 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Calvani, Terry. “The Early Legal Career of Howell Jackson.” Vanderbilt Law Review 30 (1977): 39–72.
The one substantial scholarly study of Jackson — the Tennessee Whig's rise through the wreckage of the postwar South to the federal bench.
Read it →Cameron, Charles M., and Jonathan P. Kastellec. Making the Supreme Court: The Politics of Appointments, 1930-2020. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Charles Cameron and Jonathan Kastellec of Princeton on nine decades of appointments and the turn, after about 1980, to litmus tests; Oxford, August 2023, 486 pages, the large book on the subject. Not read.
Campbell, John Archibald. Recollections of the Evacuation of Richmond, April 2d, 1865. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1880.
Campbell's own twenty-seven pages on the night the Confederate government left Richmond, written fifteen years on and printed by John Murphy of Baltimore in 1880: the former Justice, by then the Confederacy's Assistant Secretary of War, on what he saw.
Read it →Campbell, John Archibald. Reminiscences and Documents Relating to the Civil War during the Year 1865. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1887.
The fuller record, sixty-eight pages from Murphy of Baltimore in 1887, two years before his death: Campbell's papers and recollections of 1865, the year of the Hampton Roads conference he attended and of the fall of Richmond, put in order by the man himself.
Read it →Campbell, Tom W. Four Score Forgotten Men. Little Rock, AR: Pioneer Publishing Co., 1950.
A Little Rock publisher's 424 pages with portraits, catalogued by the Library of Congress under the Court's biography; the four score of the title are the justices to 1950. Not seen, and no copy found online.
Canellos, Peter S. Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026.
A journalist's biography of Alito, published on 7 April 2026, a fortnight before Hemingway's, and the more skeptical of the two: Canellos, formerly executive editor of Politico and editorial page editor of the Boston Globe, reads the jurisprudence, Dobbs above all, through grievances formed in the 1960s.
Find a copy →Canellos, Peter S. The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.
The readable modern life, and a bestseller for good reason.
Find a copy →Cannon, Jonathan Z. Environment in the Balance: The Green Movement and the Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Jonathan Cannon of Virginia reads the Court's environmental decisions since the 1960s alongside the social science on the movement, and finds early victories giving way to a judicial preference for property, growth and limited government; Harvard, April 2015, 384 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Capen, Nahum, ed. Writings of Levi Woodbury, LL.D.: Political, Judicial and Literary (3 vols.). Boston: Little, Brown, 1852.
The only published edition of Woodbury's writings — three volumes gathered the year after his death, spanning the political, judicial, and literary careers.
Read it →Caplan, Lincoln. American Justice 2016: The Political Supreme Court. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Lincoln Caplan of Yale on October Term 2015, the term that ran on eight justices after Scalia's death with the Garland nomination unheard behind it; Penn Press, October 2016, 188 pages, the third of the annual six. Not read.
Find a copy →Capowski, Vincent J.; Philip D. Wheaton. "The Making of a Jacksonian Democrat" (Fordham diss., 1966) & "Levi Woodbury, Jacksonian Financier" (Maryland diss., 1955).
Two doctoral dissertations — the rise to 1831, and the Treasury years — that between them contain most of a biography that was never written.
Cardozo, Benjamin N. Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931.
The collection whose title essay is a classic on judicial prose — Cardozo, himself one of the great stylists ever to sit on a bench, on the craft of the written opinion.
Read it →Cardozo, Benjamin N. The Growth of the Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1924.
The sequel to The Nature of the Judicial Process — Cardozo's further meditation on how judges make law within the constraints of precedent and principle.
Read it →Cardozo, Benjamin N. The Nature of the Judicial Process. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921.
The most influential little book ever written about judging, drawn from Cardozo's 1921 Storrs Lectures at Yale.
Find a copy →Cardozo, Benjamin N. The Paradoxes of Legal Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 1928.
The third of the lecture books, after The Nature of the Judicial Process and The Growth of the Law: v and 142 pages from the Columbia University Press in 1928, under the James S. Carpentier Foundation, on the tensions the law has to hold, catalogued under jurisprudence, justice and liberty.
Read it →Carmon, Irin, and Shana Knizhnik. Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. New York: Dey Street Books, 2015.
The book that crystallized the phenomenon — an affectionate, illustrated life built from the Tumblr that made an octogenarian justice a pop-culture hero, blending the biography with her landmark dissents.
Read it →Carney, Thomas E. “The Political Judge: Justice John McLean's Pursuit of the Presidency.” Ohio History 111 (2002): 121–144.
The dedicated study of McLean's perennial candidacies — courted by the Anti-Masons, Whigs, Free Soilers, and Republicans across nearly forty years while sitting as a justice.
Read it →Carr, M. Kelly. The Rhetorical Invention of Diversity: Supreme Court Opinions, Public Arguments, and Affirmative Action. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018.
How diversity was invented as the constitutional rationale for race-conscious admissions in and after Bakke, and how Powell fused individualism with multiculturalism to bridge the Court's divisions, read from the briefs, memoranda and draft opinions by M. Kelly Carr; Michigan State, May 2018, 294 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Carson, Hampton L. The Supreme Court of the United States: Its History, and Its Centennial Celebration, February 4th, 1890. Philadelphia: J. Y. Huber, 1891.
The Court's own centennial book, 745 pages with fifty-three portrait plates, prepared for the New York State Bar Association's celebration of February 4, 1890, and recast in 1902 as a two-volume history with biographies of all fifty-eight justices to that date; public domain and free to read.
Read it →Casto, William R. "James Iredell and the American Origins of Judicial Review." Connecticut Law Review 27, no. 2 (1995).
An influential specialized study arguing that Iredell grounded judicial review in popular sovereignty and the authority of a written constitution, rather than in judicial enforcement of free-floating natural law.
Casto, William R. "Oliver Ellsworth: 'I have sought the felicity and glory of your Administration.'". In Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John Marshall (1998).
The best concise, Court-centered introduction — Ellsworth's judicial service in thirty pages (pp. 292–321), with particular attention to his deference to the executive in foreign affairs and his practical, Connecticut-bred jurisprudence.
Find a copy →Casto, William R. Oliver Ellsworth and the Creation of the Federal Republic. Second Circuit Committee on History and Commemorative Events, 1997.
The essential scholarly study of Ellsworth's constitutional work, by the historian who has done more than anyone to recover him — authoritative on the Judiciary Act's drafting, Ellsworth's Calvinist intellectual formation, and his statecraft.
Find a copy →Casto, William R. The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.
The standard scholarly account of the pre-Marshall Court as an institution — circuit riding, the grand jury charges, Chisholm, the refusal of advisory opinions, and the move away from seriatim opinions.
Find a copy →Casto, William R. “Oliver Ellsworth's Calvinism: A Biographical Essay on Religion and Political Psychology in the Early Republic.” Journal of Church and State 36, no. 3 (1994): 507–526.
The best single piece on what actually made Ellsworth run.
Read it →Cate, Wirt Armistead. Lucius Q.C. Lamar: Secession and Reunion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935.
The big one — nearly six hundred pages from the University of North Carolina Press, written when men who had known Lamar were barely a generation gone.
Catron, John. "Biographical Letter from Justice Catron." United States Monthly Law Magazine 5, no. 2 (1852): 145–151.
The self-made man tells his own story: the poverty, the missing schooling, the war service under Jackson, the mountain practice.
Chandler, Adam D. “Slow and Steady: David Souter's Life in the Law.” Yale Law Journal Forum (2010).
The best short study of Souter's jurisprudence — a refutation of the 'stealth justice' caricature, showing a consistent Harlan-style common-law incrementalism running from the confirmation hearings to the late dissents.
Read it →Chandler, Walter. "The Centenary of Associate Justice John Catron." Tennessee Law Review 15, no. 1 (1937): 32–51.
The home-state tradition's fullest tribute, marking a hundred years from the 1837 appointment — commemorative in the manner of the genre (compare O'Rear on Todd and Schneider on Trimble), with Tennessee detail the national literature skips.
Charles Evans Hughes Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1836–1950.
The Library's collection, 61,000 items in 233 containers, 86 linear feet and 150 reels of microfilm, bulk 1905 to 1940: the finding aid says the Court years 'include proof sheets of the last pages of opinions rendered by the Court circulated among the justices for their comments,' and it holds the Beerits memoranda, 'prepared in the fall of 1933 and spring of 1934 by Henry C. Beerits, who was employed by Hughes to review and organize his papers,' and the papers on which, the finding aid says, Pusey's 1951 biography 'was based.'
Read it →Charns, Alexander. Cloak and Gavel: FBI Wiretaps, Bugs, Informers, and the Supreme Court. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
What eight years of Freedom of Information requests and lawsuits pulled out of the FBI: Hoover's wiretaps, informers and disinformation aimed at the justices, and Fortas passing word to the Bureau and the White House from inside the Court.
Read it →Chemerinsky, Erwin. A Court Divided: October Term 2023. Chicago: American Bar Association, Judicial Division, 2024.
Chemerinsky's ABA review of October Term 2023, at 272 pages the longest of the five; November 2024, the fourth of the annual series. Not read.
Find a copy →Chemerinsky, Erwin. A Momentous Year in the Supreme Court: October Term 2021. Chicago: American Bar Association, Judicial Division, 2022.
Chemerinsky's ABA review of October Term 2021, the term of Dobbs and Bruen, arranged by topic; 160 pages, November 2022, the second of the annual series. Not read.
Find a copy →Chemerinsky, Erwin. Closing the Courthouse Door: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
Erwin Chemerinsky on standing, immunity, federal jurisdiction and habeas as the doctrines that made constitutional rights practically unenforceable in federal court, told through people left with no remedy at all; Yale, 2017, 262 pages. Not read.
Chemerinsky, Erwin. Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights. New York: Liveright, 2021.
Erwin Chemerinsky on how the Court's criminal-procedure doctrine empowered the police, with the Warren years as the exception rather than the rule and stop-and-frisk and the limits on suing police departments as the evidence; Liveright, August 2021, 320 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Chemerinsky, Erwin. The Case Against the Supreme Court. New York: Viking, 2014.
Erwin Chemerinsky's two-century indictment, that the Court has failed at protecting minorities and restraining government in crises more often than it has succeeded, ending with reform proposals including term limits; Viking, 2014, 386 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Chemerinsky, Erwin. The Supreme Court in Transition: October Term 2020. Chicago: American Bar Association, Judicial Division, 2021.
The first of Erwin Chemerinsky's annual term reviews for the ABA's Judicial Division, on October Term 2020, the major cases arranged by topic and their consequences weighed without a verdict; 164 pages, October 2021. Not read.
Find a copy →Chemerinsky, Erwin. The Supreme Court October Term 2024: Taking Sides. Chicago: American Bar Association, Judicial Division, 2025.
Chemerinsky's ABA review of October Term 2024, whose title, Taking Sides, is his reading of a term decided along the ideological divide; November 2025, the fifth of the annual series and the one the Library of Congress catalogued. Not read.
Find a copy →Chemerinsky, Erwin. The Supreme Judiciary: October Term 2022. Chicago: American Bar Association, Judicial Division, 2023.
Chemerinsky's ABA review of October Term 2022, which its own page says broke the pattern of a quiet term after a blockbuster one; 154 pages, October 2023, the third of the annual series. Not read.
Find a copy →“Chief Justice Vinson and His Law Clerks.” Northwestern University Law Review 49 (1954): 26.
The collective memoir of the Northwestern graduates who clerked for him, written for the memorial number and closing with a table of all his clerks.
Find a copy →Chin, Gabriel J. “The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases.” Iowa Law Review 82 (1996): 151.
The canonical corrective to Harlan hagiography — the great color-blind dissenter was reliably hostile to Chinese litigants, in Plessy's own text ('a race so different from our own') and beyond.
Read it →Chrisman, Robert, and Robert L. Allen, eds. Court of Appeal: The Black Community Speaks Out on the Racial and Sexual Politics of Clarence Thomas vs. Anita Hill. New York: Ballantine, 1992.
Forty-one essays gathered by the editors of The Black Scholar, ranging from conservative to radical, with the hearing chronology and organizational position papers, on how Black America argued over Thomas and Hill.
Christensen, Barbara B. “Mr. Justice Whittaker: The Man on the Right.” Santa Clara Law Review 19 (1979): 1039.
The fullest article-length study before the two biographies: the boyhood, the night law school, the votes, and the testimony of the colleagues on how he worked (Warren: 'His entire preoccupation was with the law.
Read it →Christensen, George A. “Here Lies the Supreme Court: Revisited.” Journal of Supreme Court History 33, no. 1 (2008): 17–41.
A census of the justices' graves, and it earns its place here because for Woods the small verifiable facts are the scarce ones.
Read it →Christman, Henry H., ed. The Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl Warren. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966.
The one item Friedman and Israel's chapter names: Christman's selection of the Chief Justice's speeches and opinions, published in 1966 while he still sat, xi and 237 pages.
Read it →Clancy, Martin, and Tim O'Brien. Murder at the Supreme Court: Lethal Crimes and Landmark Cases. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013.
Two reporters, Martin Clancy and Tim O'Brien, pair each capital ruling with the crime behind it and follow both from the scene to the execution chamber, beginning with the 1969 vote that nearly abolished the death penalty; Prometheus, 2013, 410 pages. Not read.
Clark, Benjamin. Contending for American Nationhood: Joseph Story and the Debate over a Federal Common Law. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024.
A 2024 monograph on Story's nationalism by Benjamin Clark, a senior lecturer at Georgia College & State University: the early Republic's fight over whether there was a federal common law, read as a contest between the compact theory of the Union and the nationalist theory Story championed, a battle Story lost and a war his side won.
Clark, Floyd Barzilia. The Constitutional Doctrines of Justice Harlan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1915.
The first scholarly study of Harlan's jurisprudence — a Johns Hopkins monograph published four years after his death, dated in method but foundational, and still cited for its early map of the great dissents.
Read it →Clark, Hunter R. Justice Brennan: The Great Conciliator. Birch Lane Press, 1995.
A portrait organized around the quality that made Brennan effective — the warmth and patience with which he built majorities, 'with five votes you can do anything.'
Read it →Clark, Tom C. “Tom C. Clark Oral History Interview, March 20, 1976.” Harry S. Truman Library Oral History Program (1976).
The 1949 appointment as he remembered it fifteen months before his death: the summons, 'I want to put you on the Court,' and 'It was just a bolt of lightning for me'; the steel seizure concurrence and the silence that followed, 'I never heard from him one way or the other'; and the verdict, two years after Miller's book had Truman calling him a mistake, that 'Mr.
Find a copy →Clark, Tom C. “Tom C. Clark Oral History Interview, October 17, 1972 and February 8, 1973.” Harry S. Truman Library Oral History Program (1973).
Tom C. Clark's two Truman Library interviews of 1972 and 1973: the war-fraud cases and Senator Truman, the loyalty program, the West Coast evacuation he later thought 'entirely unnecessary', and the 1946 choice of Vinson, with Hughes's advice and the poker table.
Find a copy →Clark, Tom S. The Limits of Judicial Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Tom S. Clark on judicial independence as something Congress can take back, built on interviews with justices, legislators and staff and on data covering every Court-curbing bill introduced since 1877; Cambridge, November 2010, 356 pages, in the Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions series. Not read.
Clark, Tom S. The Supreme Court: An Analytic History of Constitutional Decision Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Tom Clark's quantitative history of constitutional law since Reconstruction, which sets out to join the humanistic and the social-scientific accounts of how doctrine develops; Cambridge, March 2019, 428 pages. Not read.
Clawson, Rosalee A., and Eric N. Waltenburg. Legacy and Legitimacy: Black Americans and the Supreme Court. Temple University Press, 2009.
Rosalee Clawson and Eric Waltenburg on Black Americans and the Court, using survey data, experiments and a comparison of mainstream and Black press coverage to test legitimacy theory, and finding that Black citizens with higher diffuse support move toward the Court's decisions even when they dislike them; Temple University Press, December 2008, 231 pages. Not read.
Clayton, Cornell W., and Howard Gillman, eds. Supreme Court Decision-Making: New Institutionalist Approaches. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
The Chicago half of the new institutionalist pair, 344 illustrated pages from 1999 on decision making, judicial process and law and politics; the Kansas twin is on this shelf beside it. No copy found online. Not read.
Clifford, Philip Greely. Nathan Clifford, Democrat (1803–1881). New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1922.
The grandson is loyal but not blind, and the book preserves correspondence and Maine detail found nowhere else: the party man's climb — Jacksonian legislator, Polk's Attorney General, the minister who carried the ratified Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Buchanan's doughface appointee.
Read it →Clifton, James M. "Alfred Moore." Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (William S. Powell, ed.) (1991).
The best available account of Moore's whole life: the Cape Fear planter dynasty, Revolutionary service at Moore's Creek Bridge and Charleston, the resignation from the army after his father's death, the British destruction of his Buchoi rice plantation, nine years as North Carolina's attorney general, the appointment to Iredell's seat, and the quiet exit.
Find a copy →Clouatre, Douglas. Presidents and Their Justices. University Press of America, 2010.
Douglas Clouatre's account of presidential Supreme Court appointments, built on a 2005 expert survey and grouped into successful appointments by great presidents, failed appointments by great presidents and successful appointments by mediocre ones, with Harding, Grant, Kennedy, Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt discussed and Hoover ranked high and Truman low; University Press of America, September 2010, 277 pages. Not read.
Coan, Andrew. Rationing the Constitution: How Judicial Capacity Shapes Supreme Court Decision-Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
Andrew Coan of Arizona on the consequence of a Court that can decide only a sliver of the constitutional questions put to it: it must choose hard-edged categorical rules or deference, and capacity rather than theory explains much of what it does; Harvard, April 2019, 280 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Cohen, Adam. Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. New York: Penguin Press, 2020.
Adam Cohen sets the Warren Court's expansion of rights against the fifty years since Nixon and argues that the Court has been one of the engines of American economic inequality; Penguin Press, 2020, 416 pages. Not read.
Cohen, Jeremy. Congress Shall Make No Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes, the First Amendment, and Judicial Decision Making. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989.
A short monograph on Holmes and the First Amendment, the ground Healy's The Great Dissent covers at book length twenty-four years later, read here as a study in how a judge decides: the speech cases and the reasoning behind them, with a fourteen-page bibliography.
Read it →Cohen, Morris L., and Sharon Hamby O’Connor. A Guide to the Early Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States. Littleton, CO: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1995.
A bibliography of the United States Reports themselves: the nominative era, volume by volume, with biographical summaries of the early Reporters from Dallas to Wallace — the men whose names are the citations — in 237 pages.
Cole, Donald B. Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800–1851. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
The standard monograph on the political machine Woodbury rode from Concord to the cabinet to the Court — with Woodbury himself as its central figure.
Find a copy →Coletta, Paolo E. The Presidency of William Howard Taft. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1973.
The standard scholarly account of the troubled 1909–1913 presidency — the tariff, the Ballinger–Pinchot affair, and the rupture with Theodore Roosevelt that split the Republican Party and cost Taft the White House.
Read it →Collins, Paul M., Jr. Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Paul Collins on what amicus briefs actually do, drawn from thousands of decisions between 1946 and 2001 and from law, marketing, political science and social psychology, with the finding that they affect both how the justices vote and whether they write separately; Oxford, August 2008, 248 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Collins, Paul M., Jr., and Lori A. Ringhand. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Paul Collins and Lori Ringhand read more than seventy years of hearing transcripts and argue that the hearings are a genuine democratic forum in which constitutional values are contested and the canon and anti-canon of precedent are made; Cambridge, June 2013, 296 pages. Not read.
Collins, Paul M., Jr., and Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha. The President and the Supreme Court: Going Public on Judicial Decisions from Washington to Trump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Why presidents talk publicly about pending cases and criticise decided ones, and what the talk does to how the bureaucracy, Congress, the press and the public receive a ruling, by Paul Collins and Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, from Washington to Trump; Cambridge, 2019, 267 pages. Not read.
Colucci, Frank J. Justice Kennedy's Jurisprudence: The Full and Necessary Meaning of Liberty. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009.
The best single study of how Kennedy thought, and the natural starting point given the absence of a full biography.
Find a copy →Comiskey, Michael. Seeking Justices: The Judging of Supreme Court Nominees. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
The modern confirmation process examined chapter by chapter: the Senate's constitutional role, the charge of politicization, whether the process yields good justices, the Thomas hearings, and whether nominees are really 'all that stealthy.'
Read it →Connor, Henry G. John Archibald Campbell: Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1853–1861. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920.
The first biography, written by a sitting federal judge — Henry Groves Connor of North Carolina — with a judge's sympathy for the impossible position.
Read it →Conroy, James B. Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2014.
Campbell aboard the River Queen in February 1865, one of three Confederate commissioners facing Lincoln and Seward — the same Seward whose 1861 assurances he had carried.
Find a copy →Cook, Adrian. The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-American Relations, 1865–1872. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
The standard monograph on the Alabama Claims settlement — the great Anglo-American arbitration Nelson helped negotiate as a member of the Joint High Commission in 1871, at age seventy-eight, in the most consequential public service of his late career.
Find a copy →Cooper, Phillip J. Battles on the Bench: Conflict Inside the Supreme Court. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
Conflict among the justices as a subject in itself, the interpersonal side of the judicial process, from the University Press of Kansas.
Read it →Corley, Pamela C. Concurring Opinion Writing on the U.S. Supreme Court. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010.
Pamela Corley on the concurrence as an instrument: an expression of preference over legal rules and a form of dialogue with colleagues, the bar, the public and Congress; State University of New York Press, 2010, 158 pages, in the SUNY series in American Constitutionalism. Not read.
Corley, Pamela C., Amy Steigerwalt, and Artemus Ward. The Puzzle of Unanimity: Consensus on the United States Supreme Court. Stanford Law Books, 2013.
Why about a third of the Court's cases come out unanimous: Pamela Corley, Amy Steigerwalt and Artemus Ward test legal certainty as the constraint on ideological preference across the decisions of 1953 to 2004, using the Supreme Court Database, internal documents and the justices' papers; Stanford Law Books, May 2013, 216 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Corley, Pamela C., Amy Steigerwalt, and Artemus Ward. When Dissents Matter: Judicial Dialogue through US Supreme Court Opinions. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023.
The first systematic study of whether dissents move later majorities, from the justices' papers and new data, by Pamela Corley, Amy Steigerwalt and Artemus Ward; Virginia, 2023, 164 pages. Not read.
Corwin, Edward S. Court over Constitution: A Study of Judicial Review as an Instrument of Popular Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938.
Corwin's 1938 study of judicial review 'as an instrument of popular government', written the year after the court-packing fight; reprinted by Peter Smith and by Hein.
Read it →Corwin, Edward S. John Marshall and the Constitution: A Chronicle of the Supreme Court. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919.
Corwin's short life-and-Court, written for Yale's Chronicles of America in 1919, the short way in: the man and his Court in 242 pages, by the author of The Doctrine of Judicial Review (1914).
Read it →Corwin, Edward S. The Twilight of the Supreme Court: A History of Our Constitutional Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934.
Corwin's 1934 history of American constitutional theory, published as the New Deal cases were reaching the Court and titled for where he thought the Court's power was heading; reprinted in 1970.
Read it →Cotter, Daniel S. The Chief Justices: The Seventeen Men of the Center Seat, Their Courts, and Their Times. Twelve Tables Press, 2019.
A chapter apiece for all seventeen chiefs from Jay to Roberts: how each reached the center seat, who sat beside him, and the decisions his Court is remembered for — a survey rather than a reference.
Cottrol, Robert J., and Brannon P. Denning. To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2023.
Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning's history of the Second Amendment at the Court, broad at the founding, near extinction by the late twentieth century, revived in Heller, McDonald and Bruen; Kansas, October 2023, 376 pages. Not read.
Coulson, Doug. Judicial Rhapsodies: Rhetoric and Fundamental Rights in the Supreme Court. Amherst: Amherst College Press, 2023.
Doug Coulson of Carnegie Mellon on the high style of the great rights opinions, the judicial rhapsody as a feature of the Court's work rather than a lapse; Amherst College Press, February 2023, and open access at Fulcrum. Not read.
Find a copy →Countryman, Edwin. "Samuel Nelson." The Green Bag 19, no. 6 (1907): 329–334.
The Gilded Age legal magazine's affectionate profile — the New York bar's memory of its greatest chief justice a generation after his death.
Read it →Countryman, Vern. The Judicial Record of Justice William O. Douglas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
The scholarly counterweight to the biographies' color — Countryman's systematic survey of what Douglas actually did on the bench across thirty-six years, the longest tenure in the Court's history.
Read it →Cover, Robert M. Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975.
One of the most influential books ever written about American judging, and Woodbury is among its exhibits: the study of antebellum judges who applied proslavery law while professing personal opposition — the 'moral-formal dilemma' in its sharpest form.
Find a copy →Cox, Archibald. The Court and the Constitution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Judicial review traced as an evolving practice from English antecedents through desegregation and abortion, written from a frankly liberal standpoint by Watergate's special prosecutor.
Read it →Cox, Archibald. The Warren Court: Constitutional Decision as an Instrument of Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
The Warren Court appraised in 144 pages the year before Warren retired, from lectures Cox gave for Harvard Law School in Honolulu in 1967: constitutional decision as an instrument of reform, in the title's phrase.
Read it →Coyle, Marcia. The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
The best narrative of the Roberts Court's first decade, told through four blockbusters: guns, campaign finance, health care, voting rights.
Read it →Cramton, Roger C., and Paul D. Carrington, eds. Reforming the Court: Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2006.
Essays out of a Duke Law School conference on whether long tenures are a problem, whether term limits could be enacted by statute or would need an amendment, and how the timing of vacancies affects presidential influence, edited by Roger Cramton of Cornell and Paul Carrington of Duke; Carolina Academic Press, Durham, 2006, 516 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Craven, W. Frank. “Abraham Smith.” Princetonians, 1776–1783: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Richard A. Harrison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 201–204.
Four pages on the other man in the 1785 affair, and the only place it is told: Abraham Smith, eldest son of the lawyer Thomas Smith and nephew of the Loyalist chief justice William Smith and of Joshua Hett Smith of the Arnold-André meeting (held, Craven notes, in Thomas Smith's own Haverstraw house), who went into British-held New York in 1779 and may have joined the King's forces.
Cray, Ed. Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
The fullest cradle-to-grave narrative — Ed Cray's thorough, readable life, strong on the California political career that shaped the man before Eisenhower named him and came to regret it.
Read it →Crew, Spencer R. Thurgood Marshall: A Life in American History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019.
Spencer Crew, the Robinson Professor of History at George Mason, on the whole career as one episode in a longer struggle: the Baltimore boyhood, three decades on the road for the NAACP trying segregation cases and pressing local communities to contest discrimination, then the Court and the clients without wealth or power.
Cross, Frank B. The Failed Promise of Originalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Frank Cross of Texas tests empirically whether originalism constrains ideological preference and concludes that its historical evidence is unreliable and its results indeterminate enough to legitimise any outcome; Stanford Law Books, 2013, 240 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Cruz, Ted. One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History. Regnery Publishing, 2020.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a former Rehnquist clerk and Texas solicitor general, on the rights he says turn on a single vote and therefore on a single seat; Regnery, September 2020, 256 pages, and a political book rather than a study. Not read.
Currie, David P. The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years, 1789–1888. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Case-by-case criticism of the constitutional decisions from Jay to Waite, judging each Court on the craft of its opinions; the first of Currie's two volumes, the second of which carries the method to 1986.
Read it →Currie, David P. The Constitution in the Supreme Court: The Second Century, 1888–1986. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Case-by-case criticism of constitutional decisions from Fuller to Burger, judging each Court on the craft of its opinions — an approach one reviewer dismissed as "chronology without history."
Currie, David P.; Frank H. Easterbrook. "The Most Insignificant Justice: A Preliminary Inquiry" & "...Further Evidence." University of Chicago Law Review 50, no. 2 (1983): 466–503.
The most entertaining scholarship ever written about Todd — a deadpan empirical competition for judicial insignificance in which Currie crowns Todd and Easterbrook, marshaling further evidence, presses the claims of Gabriel Duvall.
Read it →Curtis, Benjamin R., Jr., ed., with George Ticknor Curtis. A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, LL.D., with Some of His Professional and Miscellaneous Writings (2 vols.). Boston: Little, Brown, 1879.
The Victorian monument, assembled by his son with his brother George Ticknor Curtis, the constitutional historian — and the indispensable primary trove: correspondence, the poisonous resignation exchange with Taney, the impeachment argument, and the professional writings.
Read it →Curtis, Benjamin Robbins. Executive Power. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1862.
The Dred Scott dissenter against Lincoln: a forty-page pamphlet from Little, Brown in the autumn of 1862 on the proclamations of 22 and 24 September, the preliminary emancipation and the suspension of habeas corpus, arguing that the first 'proposes to repeal and annul valid State laws which regulate the domestic relations of their people' and asking what follows 'if the President of the United States has an implied constitutional right, as commander-in-chief of the army and navy in time of war, to disregard any one positive prohibition of the Constitution.'
Read it →Curtis, Charles P., Jr. Lions under the Throne. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.
A 1947 study of the Court for the lay reader, in its own words 'addressed particularly to those laymen who know more constitutional law than they think they do, and to those lawyers who know less.'
Read it →Cushing, John D. “A Revolutionary Conservative: The Public Life of William Cushing, 1732–1810.” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Clark University, 1960.
No biography of Cushing has ever been published — and this dissertation is the only full-length life ever written, by the scholar who owned the subject.
Cushing, John D. “The Cushing Court and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts: More Notes on the ‘Quock Walker Case.’”. American Journal of Legal History 5, no. 2 (1961): 118–144.
The foundational modern examination of the 1783 Jennison ruling that tradition credits with ending slavery in Massachusetts — and of how much (or little) Cushing's jury charge actually decided.
Find a copy →Cushman, Barry. Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
The essential modern frame for Roberts's reputation — Cushman's revisionist case that the 1937 'switch in time' was doctrinal evolution, not political capitulation, which if right acquits Roberts of the charge that defines him.
Find a copy →Cushman, Barry. “The Secret Lives of the Four Horsemen.” Virginia Law Review 83 (1997): 559.
The most-cited essay ever written about the Court's conservative bloc — Cushman's demolition of the cartoon Four Horsemen, drawing on their private papers to recover four working judges rather than four villains.
Read it →Cushman, Clare, ed. The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789–2012. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2013.
The Supreme Court Historical Society's illustrated capsule lives — the reliable standard for a justice with no biography, each with a portrait.
Find a copy →Cushman, Clare. An Illustrated Guide to the Supreme Court. Washington, DC: Article Books, Supreme Court Historical Society, 2024.
The Supreme Court Historical Society's own illustrated guide to how the Court works, appointment, case selection and decision, by Clare Cushman with an introduction by James C. Duff; Article Books, 2024. Not read.
Cushman, Clare. Courtwatchers: Eyewitness Accounts in Supreme Court History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.
Memoirs, letters, diaries and newspaper accounts by justices, their families, Court staff and journalists, woven by Clare Cushman of the Supreme Court Historical Society into thematic chapters across more than two centuries, from Daniel Webster addressing the Court in 1844 to John Roberts waiting for the nomination call in 2005; Rowman and Littlefield, October 2011, 312 pages. Not read.
Cushman, Clare. “Father on the Bench: Justice William R. Day and Kinship Recusal.” Journal of Supreme Court History 46, no. 1 (2021): 62–80.
The only substantial Day scholarship since the 1946 biography — a study of a problem Day lived daily: his sons practiced before the Court, and his recusal practice became an early case study in judicial-family ethics.
Custer, Lawrence B. "Bushrod Washington and John Marshall: A Preliminary Inquiry." American Journal of Legal History 4 (1960).
The classic examination of the Court's closest working partnership — whether Bushrod was Marshall's shadow or an independent mind who happened to agree.
Find a copy →Dalin, David G. Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court: From Brandeis to Kagan. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017.
Collective portrait of the eight Jewish justices from Brandeis to Kagan — their nominations and the antisemitism that met them, the "Jewish seat" convention, and their relations with the presidents who chose them.
Danelski, David J. A Supreme Court Justice Is Appointed. New York: Random House, 1964.
A small classic of Court scholarship, and the closest thing to a Butler book.
Find a copy →Danelski, David J., and Artemus Ward, eds. The Chief Justice: Appointment and Influence. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016.
What the Chief Justice can actually do, studied with social-science methods: presiding at argument and conference, speaking first, assigning opinions and leading the Judicial Conference, in essays edited by David Danelski and Artemus Ward; Michigan, August 2016, 464 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Danforth, John C. Resurrection: The Confirmation of Clarence Thomas. New York: Viking, 1994.
The 1991 fight as run by Thomas's chief Senate champion — his former boss in Missouri, and an ordained Episcopal priest — who recounts doing whatever it took and nearly losing his soul to rage.
Dangerfield, George. Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746–1813. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960.
The book Friedman and Israel send the reader to for want of a biography of Brockholst: Dangerfield's life of the cousin, the Chancellor, in which, as Dunne's bibliography puts it, 'the best picture of Brockholst Livingston is had in the fragmentary and episodic asides.'
Read it →Davenport, James H. Western Water Rights and the U.S. Supreme Court. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020.
A book built on one Van Devanter opinion and what came of it: Wyoming v. Colorado (1922), which held that prior appropriation governs water across state lines and led to the Colorado River Compact.
Find a copy →Davies, Ross E. "Recognition and Volition: Remembering the Retirement of Justice Gabriel Duvall." The Journal of Law 4, no. 1 (2014): 1–10.
The strangest endgame of any early justice: profoundly deaf, Duvall would not resign until he understood that Roger Taney, a fellow Marylander, would be nominated for his seat.
Davies, Ross E. "William Cushing, Chief Justice of the United States." University of Toledo Law Review 37, no. 3 (2006).
A detailed revisionist study of the strange 1796 episode.
Read it →Davis, Curtis Carroll. The King's Chevalier: A Biography of Lewis Littlepage. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961.
Where, by Dunne's bibliography, 'A view of his days in Spain and his beginnings in New York may be found': the life of Lewis Littlepage (1762-1802), the Virginian who went to Madrid with Jay, quarrelled with him, and in December 1785 published the charges that drew Brockholst, Jay's secretary, into the public quarrel that the Jay Papers preserve.
Read it →Davis, Junius. Alfred Moore and James Iredell, Revolutionary Patriots. Address to the Supreme Court of North Carolina. Raleigh: North Carolina Society of the Sons of the Revolution, 1899.
Read it →Davis, Michael D., and Hunter R. Clark. Thurgood Marshall: Warrior at the Bar, Rebel on the Bench. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1992.
Davis, Richard, ed. Covering the United States Supreme Court in the Digital Age. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Essays edited by Richard Davis of Brigham Young on the tension between a Court that wants its deliberations private and a press whose job is to report them, with working Court journalists among the contributors; Cambridge, August 2014, 269 pages. Not read.
Davis, Richard. Electing Justice: Fixing the Supreme Court Nomination Process. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
How the nomination process turned from an elite matter into a public campaign of interest groups, media and public opinion from the late 1960s on, with proposals for fixing it; Oxford, 2005.
Read it →Davis, Richard. Justices and Journalists: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Media. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Richard Davis asking whether the justices are becoming more publicity-conscious and why, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century justices' papers and a content analysis of coverage from 1968 to 2007; Cambridge, February 2011, 264 pages. Not read.
Davis, Richard. Supreme Democracy: The End of Elitism in Supreme Court Nominations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Richard Davis of Brigham Young traces the nomination process from quiet settlement among presidents, senators and legal elites to the eighty-one-day media contest of today, stage by stage, and asks whether the democratisation has improved anything; Oxford, July 2017, 288 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Davis, Sue. Justice Rehnquist and the Constitution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
The first serious study of Rehnquist's constitutional philosophy — Sue Davis on the consistent conservatism behind the early solo dissents, written when he was still the Court's right flank rather than its Chief.
Read it →De Hart, Jane Sherron. Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
The definitive biography, the product of years of research and interviews with Ginsburg herself.
Find a copy →Dean, John W. The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court. New York: Free Press, 2001.
Nixon's own White House counsel, working from the Nixon tapes, reconstructs the accidental, cynical, and finally fateful process that put Rehnquist on the Court in 1971 — 'Renchburg,' as Nixon kept calling him.
Find a copy →“Death of Mr. Chief Justice Vinson.” United States Reports 346 (1953).
The Court's first word, from Black when it sat on October 5, 1953: 'With deep sorrow the Court records at this time the sudden and unexpected death on September 8, 1953, of our Chief Justice, Fred M. Vinson,' and 'They loved him for his kindness, sympathy, understanding and fairness.'
Read it →Degnan, Daniel A. “William Paterson: Small States’ Nationalist.” In Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John Marshall. 1998.
The best concise, Court-centered treatment.
Find a copy →Delaplaine, Edward S. The Life of Thomas Johnson. New York: F. H. Hitchcock, 1927.
The only full-length biography devoted to Johnson and therefore the natural starting point — detailed on the Maryland politics, Revolutionary service, friendship with Washington, governorship, constitutional work, Federal City commission, and brief Court tenure.
Read it →Dennie, Madiba K. The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back. New York: Random House, 2024.
Madiba Dennie of Balls and Strikes against originalism as the current Court practises it, with an inclusive constitutionalism rooted in the Reconstruction Amendments offered instead; Random House, June 2024, 304 pages, and advocacy by design. Not read.
Find a copy →DePlato, Justin P., with Matthew M. Markulin. The United States Supreme Court and Politics: Judicial Retirements, the Docket, and the Nomination Process. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.
A short quantitative study by Justin DePlato with Matthew Markulin of the three political mechanics of the Court, judicial retirements, the shaping of the docket and the nomination process; Lexington, 102 pages, dated 2020 by the Library and November 2019 by the carriers. Not read.
deVergie, Adrienne, and Mary Kate Kell, comps. Location Guide to the Manuscripts of Supreme Court Justices. Austin: Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas School of Law, 1978.
Where every justice's papers were in 1978, justice by justice, in 146 leaves from the Tarlton Law Library at Texas, the print ancestor of the online finding aids; now on HeinOnline.
Devins, Neal, and Lawrence Baum. The Company They Keep: How Partisan Divisions Came to the Supreme Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Neal Devins and Lawrence Baum argue that justices answer to the elite social networks around them rather than to public opinion or the other branches, and that ideology now tracks the appointing president's party because those networks have polarised; Oxford, February 2019, 272 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Dias, Elizabeth, and Lisa Lerer. The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America. New York: Flatiron Books, 2024.
Two New York Times reporters' deeply sourced history of the movement that ended Roe — with Alito as the justice who wrote the opinion and weathered the leak.
Find a copy →Dichio, Michael A. The US Supreme Court and the Centralization of Federal Authority. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2018.
Michael Dichio builds a database of landmark decisions from the casebooks and treatises of 1822 to 2010 and finds that the Court enlarged federal authority whatever the issue and whatever its own composition; SUNY Press, 2018, 268 pages. Not read.
Dickson, Del, ed. The Supreme Court in Conference (1940-1985): The Private Discussions behind Nearly 300 Supreme Court Decisions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
The conference itself: a thousand pages from Oxford in 2001 reconstructing the private discussions behind nearly three hundred decisions from the justices' own notes, catalogued under the Court's records and correspondence and under sources for its history. The nearest thing on this shelf to a primary record of how the votes were taken. No copy found online. Not read.
Dillon, John F., ed. John Marshall: Life, Character and Judicial Services as Portrayed in the Centenary and Memorial Addresses and Proceedings throughout the United States on Marshall Day, 1901, and in the Classic Orations of Binney, Story, Phelps, Waite and Rawle (3 vols.). Chicago: Callaghan & Company, 1903.
The Marshall Day record: three volumes from Callaghan of Chicago in 1903 gathering the addresses given across the country on 4 February 1901, the centenary year of Marshall's chief justiceship, with the older orations of Binney, Story (the 1835 eulogy), Phelps, Waite and Rawle.
Read it →Dillon, Mark C. The First Chief Justice: John Jay and the Struggle of a New Nation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2022.
A focused, thoughtful study of Jay's formative role in establishing the early Supreme Court and federal judiciary.
Find a copy →Dodson, Scott, ed. The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
The major posthumous scholarly volume — Totenberg, Herma Hill Kay, Linda Kerber, the Siegels, and others assessing the advocate and the justice, updated after her death with a foreword by Justice Breyer.
Find a copy →Doherty, Brian. Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle Over the Second Amendment. Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2008.
District of Columbia v. Heller followed from the plaintiffs' side, from the lawyers who brought the case through the briefing and the argument to the 2008 decision, by Brian Doherty, a senior editor at Reason; Cato Institute, Washington, October 2008, 181 pages, from a publisher that was part of the litigation's intellectual history. Not read.
Find a copy →Domnarski, William. The Great Justices, 1941-54: Black, Douglas, Frankfurter, and Jackson in Chambers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
William Domnarski on the four Roosevelt appointees who dominated the Court from 1941 to 1954, Black, Douglas, Frankfurter and Jackson, and on how their personalities, ambitions and quarrels shaped what it decided, written from their correspondence, diaries and conference notes; Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2006, 224 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Donald, David, ed. Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase. New York: Longmans, Green, 1954.
Chase's Civil War diaries, edited by the great Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald — the Treasury secretary's candid, often self-serving record of the Cabinet's inner life, from war finance to the feuds with Seward and the maneuvering against Lincoln.
Read it →Dorsen, David M. The Unexpected Scalia: A Conservative Justice's Liberal Opinions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
A liberal friend's case-by-case study of the roughly 135 times Scalia's method produced liberal results — flag burning, confrontation rights, sentencing.
Find a copy →Dorsen, Norman. “The Second Mr. Justice Harlan: A Constitutional Conservative.” New York University Law Review 44 (1969): 249.
The single most-cited Harlan article — his former clerk's portrait of the 'constitutional conservative,' the phrase that has framed every discussion of Harlan since.
Douglas, Joshua A. The Court v. the Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights. Boston: Beacon Press, 2024.
Nine voting-rights cases, Anderson v. Celebrezze to Rucho, one to a chapter, by Joshua Douglas; Beacon, May 2024. Not read.
Find a copy →Douglas, William O. A Living Bill of Rights. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.
The short one, ninety pages from Doubleday in 1961 with a bibliography, the Bill of Rights explained for the general reader by the Justice who read it most broadly.
Read it →Douglas, William O. An Almanac of Liberty. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954.
A page for every day of the year, each on a moment in the history of liberty, 409 pages from Doubleday in 1954, catalogued under constitutional law and civil rights: the sitting Justice as popular educator.
Read it →Douglas, William O. Go East, Young Man: The Early Years. New York: Random House, 1974.
Douglas's own account of the rise — the hardscrabble Yakima boyhood, the bout with polio, Columbia Law, Wall Street, Yale, and the New Deal SEC that carried him to the Court at forty.
Read it →Douglas, William O. Of Men and Mountains. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950.
His best-loved book — a lyrical memoir of the Cascades that made Douglas a hero to the conservation movement and shaped the environmental jurisprudence he would later write from the bench.
Read it →Douglas, William O. Points of Rebellion. New York: Random House, 1970.
The incendiary little book that nearly got him impeached — Douglas's defense of dissent and the youth revolt of 1969, published as Gerald Ford was building a House case to remove him.
Read it →Douglas, William O. The Anatomy of Liberty: The Rights of Man without Force. New York: Trident Press, 1963.
Liberty taken apart, 230 pages from Trident Press in 1963 with sixteen pages of notes, catalogued under civil rights, the separation of powers, the rule of law and international security: Douglas the world traveller and the domestic libertarian in one book.
Read it →Douglas, William O. The Court Years, 1939–1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 1980.
The second volume — Douglas on his thirty-six years as a justice, settling scores with colleagues and recounting the great cases, the impeachment attempts, and the four marriages.
Read it →Douglas, William O. The Douglas Opinions. Edited by Vern Countryman. New York: Random House, 1977.
The opinions, selected and arranged by Vern Countryman, the author of the Judicial Record: Random House, 1977, two years after the retirement, with a Berkley paperback in 1978.
Read it →Douglas, William O. The Right of the People. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958.
The rights of the people against the state, 250 pages from Doubleday in 1958, catalogued in the year Douglas also published Freedom is Security, West of the Indus and Exploring the Himalaya: four books in a year from a sitting Justice.
Read it →Douglas, William O. We the Judges: Studies in American and Indian Constitutional Law from Marshall to Mukherjea. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.
Douglas comparing the two great federal constitutions and their courts, Marshall's to Mukherjea's, 490 pages from Doubleday in 1956 (a Calcutta printing, From Marshall to Mukherjea, the same year): the Justice who had walked the Himalayas writing the law of the subcontinent into his own Court's story.
Read it →Dowd, Morgan D. "Justice Story and the Politics of Appointment." American Journal of Legal History 9, no. 4 (1965): 265–285.
How the fourth choice became the appointment of the century: Cushing's death, the failed nominations of Levi Lincoln, Alexander Wolcott, and John Quincy Adams, Jefferson's warnings from Monticello, and Madison's gamble on a thirty-two-year-old Salem lawyer his own party distrusted.
Downs, Harry. "Unlikely Abolitionist: William Cushing and the Struggle Against Slavery." Journal of Supreme Court History 29, no. 2 (2004).
The strongest focused treatment of Cushing's role in the Quock Walker cases and the effective end of slavery as a legally protected institution in Massachusetts — and it confronts the tension between Cushing's constitutional ruling and his own social and family connections to slaveholding New England.
Find a copy →Drinard, Elliott J. "John Blair, Jr., 1732–1800." Proceedings of the Virginia State Bar Association 39 (1926): 436–448.
Find a copy →Driver, Justin. The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2025.
Justin Driver of Yale on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and what universities may still do after it; Columbia Global Reports, September 2025, 280 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Dunham, Allison, and Philip B. Kurland, eds. Mr. Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
Nine justices in nine essays, University of Chicago Press, 1956: Biddle on Holmes, Crosskey on Marshall, Dunham on Stone, Fairman on Bradley, Freund on Brandeis, Paschal on Sutherland, Pusey on Hughes, Swisher on Taney, and a young John Paul Stevens on the justice he had clerked for, Wiley Rutledge.
Read it →Dunne, Gerald T. Hugo Black and the Judicial Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977.
An early, admiring study of Black's remaking of constitutional law — the drive to 'incorporate' the Bill of Rights against the states and read the First Amendment as an absolute.
Read it →Dunne, Gerald T. Justice Joseph Story and the Rise of the Supreme Court. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.
The livelier predecessor to Newmyer — a brisk, quotable narrative distilled from Dunne's string of 1960s Harvard Law Review articles.
Read it →Dunne, Gerald T. Monetary Decisions of the Supreme Court. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961.
A compact classic — barely a hundred pages — that gives the greenback saga its ending.
Read it →Dunne, Gerald T. “Bushrod Washington and the Mount Vernon Slaves.” Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook 5 (1980): 25–29.
The first dedicated treatment of the ugliest fact of Washington's life — his sale of fifty-four enslaved people from Mount Vernon in 1821, while serving as president of the American Colonization Society.
Dunne, Gerald T. “The Story-Livingston Correspondence (1812–1822).” American Journal of Legal History 10 (1966): 224–236.
The only dedicated scholarly article on Livingston as a justice — his private letters to Joseph Story, which are among the few windows into the Marshall Court's internal life from a justice who left almost no judicial paper trail.
Find a copy →Dutton, C. B. “Mr. Justice Tom C. Clark.” Indiana Law Journal 26 (1951): 169.
The first year measured, by an Indianapolis lawyer in the number of the Indiana Law Journal that also carries Braden on Minton: twelve majority opinions, the 9 to 2 committee vote and the 'vociferous opposition,' the footnote that 'Justice Clark owes most gratitude for his appointment to Chief Justice Vinson,' Clark and Minton 'swung' to the conservative side, and the forecast Friedman and Israel call useful, that he 'may prove to be a good working judge, even if, thus far, he has cast no perceptible foreshadow of greatness or immortality.'
Read it →Dworkin, Ronald. The Supreme Court Phalanx: The Court's New Right-Wing Bloc. New York Review Books, 2008.
Ronald Dworkin's New York Review essays on the Court's first full term with Roberts and Alito sitting, collected as a book; New York Review Books, 2008, 71 pages, a pamphlet-length polemic. Not read.
Earl Warren Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (register). Washington: Library of Congress, 1864–1974.
The papers themselves: a quarter of a million items in 846 containers, spanning 1864 to 1974, 'with the bulk of the items concentrated in the period after 1953, when Warren became chief justice,' with a chronology of the life from Bakersfield to the Warren Commission.
Read it →Easterbrook, Frank H. "The Most Insignificant Justice: Further Evidence." University of Chicago Law Review 50, no. 2 (1983): 481–503.
The reply brief in the funniest exchange in American legal scholarship.
Read it →Eisgruber, Christopher L. The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Christopher Eisgruber's proposal for the confirmation process: that senators ask when and why judges should override elected officials, and judge nominees on their writings rather than on how they perform in the hearing room; Princeton, 2007, 239 pages, by a former Stevens clerk then teaching law at New York University. Not read.
Find a copy →Eisler, Jacob. The Law of Freedom: The Supreme Court and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Jacob Eisler of Southampton on seventy years of election law as the Court's deepest intervention in American democracy, and the competing ideas of freedom behind it; Cambridge, July 2023, 329 pages. Not read.
Eisler, Kim Isaac. A Justice for All: William J. Brennan, Jr., and the Decisions That Transformed America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.
The first full biography, written before the papers opened — Eisler is good on Brennan the vote-counter and coalition-builder, the Irish-Catholic New Jersey judge who became the liberal engine of two Courts.
Read it →Ellis, Richard E. The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
The classic political history of the Jeffersonian assault on the Federalist judiciary — the strongest broad context for the impeachment, placing the trial alongside the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, Stuart v. Laird, and the struggle over the federal courts' place in the constitutional order.
Find a copy →Elsmere, Jane Shaffer. Justice Samuel Chase. Muncie, IN: Janevar, 1980.
The only other full-length life of Chase besides Stormy Patriot — published the same year, from a small Indiana press, and fuller on the judicial career and the impeachment trial.
Ely, James W., Jr. The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888–1910. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.
The modern institutional reappraisal, in South Carolina's Chief Justiceships series.
Find a copy →Ely, James W., Jr. The Contract Clause: A Constitutional History. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016.
James Ely of Vanderbilt on the contract clause from its origins protecting creditors, through the Marshall Court's use of it as the chief instrument of review over state law, to the police-power exception, the New Deal eclipse and the recent revival in pension litigation; Kansas, October 2016, 376 pages. Not read.
Ely, James W., Jr. “Rufus W. Peckham and Economic Liberty.” Vanderbilt Law Review 62, no. 2 (2009): 591.
The leading modern reassessment of the man who wrote Lochner — Ely's case that Peckham was no crude tool of capital but a coherent economic-liberty jurist in the Jacksonian antimonopoly tradition.
Read it →Epps, Garrett. American Justice 2014: Nine Clashing Visions on the Supreme Court. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Garrett Epps of Baltimore on October Term 2013, read through what the publisher calls the nine clashing constitutional visions on the bench; Penn Press, October 2014, 192 pages, the first of six annual term reviews the press published from 2014 to 2019. Not read.
Find a copy →Epstein, Lee, and Eric A. Posner. What Is Oral Argument For? University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 26-22 (2026).
Twenty terms of transcripts and 368,369 speaking turns, asking what the hour is actually for: finds that a justice’s ideology and distance from the median predict how much they talk while the attorneys’ experience predicts almost nothing, and argues that a literature counting interruptions without conditioning on participation has been measuring the wrong thing.
Read it →Epstein, Lee, and Jack Knight. The Choices Justices Make. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1998.
Two hundred pages from CQ Press in 1998 on how the justices choose, the political-science companion to Epstein's later work with Landes and Posner on the behavior of federal judges.
Read it →Epstein, Lee, and Jeffrey A. Segal. Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
The whole federal judiciary in one appointments book — district courts and circuits alongside the Supreme Court — with the quantitative literature synthesized into tables, and a blunt thesis: politics has governed the selection process from the start.
Epstein, Lee, Andrew D. Martin, Kevin M. Quinn, and Jeffrey A. Segal. "Ideology and the Study of Judicial Behavior." In Ideology, Psychology, and Law, ed. Jon Hanson (2012).
The readable account of what an ideology score is and is not — why political scientists treat ideology as indispensable to explaining judging, how the measures are actually built, and which methodological and normative objections to them remain unanswered.
Read it →Epstein, Lee, Jeffrey A. Segal, Harold J. Spaeth, and Thomas G. Walker. The Supreme Court Compendium: Two Centuries of Data, Decisions, and Developments. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2021.
The standard statistical reference on the Court, in its seventh edition: 848 pages and more than 180 tables on the justices' backgrounds, the nominations, the caseloads, the voting and the public's opinion of all of it. Three of its four authors are principal investigators of the Supreme Court Database, which is to say the tables end where this site's own voting pages begin.
Epstein, Lee, William M. Landes, and Richard A. Posner. Inferring the Winning Party. Journal of Legal Studies 39, no. 2 (2010): 433–467.
Tests the courthouse folk wisdom that the side asked more questions loses, finds that it holds, and uses the pattern to separate two accounts of what the questioning is for: a legalistic search for truth, or a realistic strategy for influencing colleagues.
Read it →Epstein, Lee, William M. Landes, and Richard A. Posner. The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
A political scientist, an economist and a sitting federal judge treat judges as labour-market actors with pecuniary and non-pecuniary motives, and test the consequences across district courts, circuit courts and the Supreme Court — not only votes and outcomes but opinion length, citations, dissents, and questions asked at oral argument.
Find a copy →Evans, Jocelyn J., and Keith Gaddie. The U.S. Supreme Court's Democratic Spaces. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021.
The Supreme Court building of 1935 and the Court's earlier homes in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, read by Jocelyn Evans and Keith Gaddie as political space rather than architecture; Oklahoma, 2021, 220 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Ewald, William. "James Wilson and the Drafting of the Constitution." University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 10, no. 5 (2008).
An exceptionally detailed reconstruction of Wilson's work at the Convention.
Read it →Ewing, Cortez A. M. The Judges of the Supreme Court, 1789–1937: A Study of Their Qualifications. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1938.
A 1938 study of the justices to that date by their qualifications, 124 pages with a map and diagrams from the University of Minnesota Press, the ancestor of Blaustein and Mersky's statistical studies forty years later.
Read it →Fairman, Charles. Mr. Justice Miller and the Supreme Court, 1862–1890. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939.
The monument, and still unsurpassed.
Read it →Fairman, Charles. Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864–88, Part One (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 6). New York: Macmillan, 1971.
The monumental Holmes Devise volumes for the Court from 1864 to 1888, and the standing institutional frame for this site across those decades.
Read it →Fairman, Charles. Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864–88, Part Two (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 7). New York: Macmillan, 1987.
The second half of Fairman, published sixteen years after the first and a separate book, and the one that matters here.
Fallon, Richard H., Jr. Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018.
Richard Fallon of Harvard grounds judicial legitimacy in good faith in constitutional argument, the justices basing decisions only on arguments they genuinely believe valid, and answers legal realism without its cynicism; Belknap, February 2018, 240 pages, and winner of the 2019 Cooley Book Prize. Not read.
Find a copy →Fallon, Richard H., Jr. The Changing Constitution: Constitutional Law in the Trump-Era Supreme Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Richard Fallon of Harvard on religion, speech, guns, equal protection and executive power in the Court since 2017, read as the product of political and institutional forces rather than doctrine alone; Cambridge, August 2025, 330 pages. Not read.
Farganis, Dion, and Justin Wedeking. Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings in the U.S. Senate: Reconsidering the Charade. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Dion Farganis and Justin Wedeking code nearly eleven thousand questions and answers from the Judiciary Committee's hearings since 1955 and find nominees more forthcoming than the charade thesis allows, with televised hearings from 1981 explaining the contrary impression; Michigan, March 2014, 176 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Farrand, Max, ed. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (4 vols., rev. ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937.
The indispensable printed collection for what the Convention's future justices actually did at Philadelphia: the notes, the plans and their variants, and Madison's account of the speeches.
Find a copy →Fassett, John D. New Deal Justice: The Life of Stanley Reed of Kentucky. New York: Vantage Press, 1994.
The one full biography, by a lawyer who clerked for Reed and knew him well.
Find a copy →Feather, Augustus G., ed. The Supreme Court of the United States: A Series of Biographical Sketches of Its Members, with a Chronological Order of Succession. 1900.
Biographical sketches of the members of the Court to 1900 with a chronological order of succession, 168 pages, no place or publisher on the Library of Congress record: the earliest all-the-justices book in this bibliography, not seen, with no copy found online.
Fede, Andrew T. “Not the Most Insignificant Justice: Reconsidering Justice Gabriel Duvall's Slavery Law Opinions Favoring Liberty.” Journal of Supreme Court History 42, no. 1 (2017): 8–27.
The key Duvall study between Easterbrook's 1983 needle and Thomas's 2020 book.
Read it →Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
The Pulitzer-winning definitive history of the case, and still the standard against which all Dred Scott scholarship is measured.
Find a copy →Feldman, Noah. Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices. New York: Twelve, 2010.
The best narrative group biography of the Roosevelt Court — Black, Douglas, Frankfurter and Jackson, “scorpions in a bottle,” whose rivalries made and unmade doctrine.
Read it →Feldman, Stephen M. Neoconservative Politics and the Supreme Court: Law, Power, and Democracy. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
Stephen Feldman on the neoconservatives who attacked pluralist democracy in the 1980s, became an interest group inside it, and kept their hold on constitutional law through the Court after losing the elected branches in 2008; NYU Press, 2013, 226 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Feldman, Stephen M. Pack the Court! A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion. Temple University Press, 2021.
Stephen Feldman of Wyoming argues that expanding the Court would not cost it its legitimacy, because law and politics were never separable in constitutional interpretation, and that Democrats should expand it while they can; Temple, August 2021, 278 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Feldman, Stephen M. Who Belongs: White Christian Nationalism and the Roberts Court. New York: New York University Press, 2026.
Stephen M. Feldman of Wyoming argues that the Roberts Court's religion, speech and equal-protection decisions serve a white Christian nationalist politics rather than a return to pre-1937 doctrine; NYU Press, January 2026, 280 pages, and a thesis the shelf records without adjudicating. Not read.
Felix Frankfurter Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1846–1966.
The personal papers, 70,650 items, which the finding aid says Frankfurter 'considered to be his personal papers' and which are 'supplemented by his Supreme Court files which he gave to the Law School of Harvard University'; the diaries, diary notes and appointment books run from 1911 to 1965.
Read it →Felix, Antonia. Sonia Sotomayor: The True American Dream. New York: Berkley Books, 2010.
An accessible earlier biography, strong on the Puerto Rican family, the childhood diabetes, and the Princeton-and-Yale ascent.
Read it →Fernandez, Mark F. “John Blair (1731–1800).” In Dictionary of Virginia Biography. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1998.
The best concise account of Blair's whole public life — especially useful on his Virginia judgeships, the uncertain evidence surrounding Commonwealth v. Caton, the 1788 judicial remonstrance, the Convention, circuit riding, Chisholm, Penhallow, and his resignation for poor health.
Find a copy →Ferren, John M. Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court: The Story of Justice Wiley Rutledge. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
The definitive biography, by a judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals who spent years recovering a justice history had let slip.
Find a copy →Fiebelman, Herbert U.; James L. Noles Jr. "John McKinley of Alabama" (Alabama Lawyer 22, 1961) & "Alabama's Forgotten Justices: John McKinley and John A. Campbell" (Alabama Lawyer 63, 2002).
The home-state bar's two remembrances, forty years apart, as the FJC's bibliography lists them — Fiebelman's the fuller career sketch, Noles's a double portrait pairing McKinley with Alabama's other justice, John Archibald Campbell.
Field, Stephen J. Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California, with Other Sketches. 1893.
Field's own memoir of the Gold Rush frontier — the vigilante justice, the mining-camp law, and the feuds that forged the most combative justice of the Gilded Age.
Read it →Fine, Sidney. Frank Murphy (3 vols.: The Detroit Years; The New Deal Years; The Washington Years). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984.
The monumental scholarly biography, three volumes and nearly two decades in the making, and one of the fullest lives ever written of any justice.
Find a copy →Finkelman, Paul, ed. Milestone Documents of the Supreme Court: Exploring the Cases That Shaped America. Dallas: Schlager Group, 2023.
Eighty decisions with the text of each and a commentary, edited by Paul Finkelman for libraries, in six volumes; Schlager Group, 2023, 1,496 pages. Not read.
Finkelman, Paul, ed. The Supreme Court: Controversies, Cases, and Characters from John Jay to John Roberts. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014.
Paul Finkelman's four-volume reference arranged chronologically by Chief Justice from 1789 to 2013, evaluating each chief justiceship through its major cases; ABC-CLIO, January 2014, 1,432 pages, pitched at high-school and undergraduate readers. Not read.
Finkelman, Paul. "John McLean: Moderate Abolitionist and Supreme Court Politician." Vanderbilt Law Review 62, no. 2 (2009): 519–566.
Finkelman, elsewhere the Court's sternest prosecutor on slavery, gives McLean real credit: the lone Prigg dissenter, the Dred Scott dissenter, the one justice antislavery America trusted.
Read it →Finkelman, Paul. Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Three justices — Marshall, Story and Taney — tried for their records on slavery, with Story's chapter the most unsettling because expectations are highest.
Find a copy →Fish, Peter Graham. Federal Justice in the Mid-Atlantic South: United States Courts from Maryland to the Carolinas, 1789–1835. Washington, DC: Administrative Office of the United States Courts, 2002.
An institutional history rather than a biography, but the most useful book for placing Blair's circuit service in the world of the early federal courts of the Mid-Atlantic South — the demanding circuit system that occupied far more of an early justice's time than the Court's small appellate docket.
Read it →Fisher, Louis. On the Supreme Court: Without Illusion and Idolatry. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014.
Louis Fisher's short book against judicial finality, arguing that constitutional interpretation is shared with the elected branches, the states and the public and that the Court exercises review without holding the last word; Paradigm, 2014, 242 pages. Not read.
Fisher, Louis. Reconsidering Judicial Finality: Why the Supreme Court Is Not the Last Word on the Constitution. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2019.
Louis Fisher's case against judicial finality, told through the decisions the elected branches and the public effectively reversed, on slavery, child labour, internment, abortion and religious liberty; Kansas, August 2019, 288 pages. Not read.
Fisher, Louis. Supreme Court Expansion of Presidential Power: Unconstitutional Leanings. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2017.
Louis Fisher's case that the Court held a neutral line between the branches for a century and a half before turning in the 1930s toward executive independence in emergencies, traced through impoundment, the vetoes, immunity, recess appointments and immigration; Kansas, July 2017, 352 pages. Not read.
Fiss, Owen M. Troubled Beginnings of the Modern State, 1888–1910 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 8). New York: Macmillan, 1993.
The Holmes Devise volume for the early Fuller Court, 1888–1910.
Find a copy →Flanders, Henry. The Lives and Times of the Chief Justices: John Jay and John Rutledge (Vol. 1). Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1855.
A substantial nineteenth-century account of the first two Chief Justices.
Find a copy →Flanders, Henry. The Lives and Times of the Chief Justices: William Cushing, Oliver Ellsworth, John Marshall (Vol. 2). Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1858.
Find a copy →Fletcher, Kimberley L. The Collision of Political and Legal Time: Foreign Affairs and the Supreme Court's Transformation of Executive Authority. Temple University Press, 2018.
Kimberley Fletcher of San Diego State reads Curtiss-Wright, the internment cases, Youngstown, Dames & Moore and the detainee cases as one line in which the Court is an agent of institutional change rather than a follower of politics; Temple, May 2018, 296 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Foote. “Mr. Justice Brennan: A Profile.” Harvard Law School Bulletin (November 1966): 4.
A profile in the law school's alumni magazine in the month of his tenth anniversary, cited by Friedman and Israel as 18 Harvard Law School Bulletin 4 (1966).
Ford, Christine Blasey. One Way Back: A Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2024.
The witness's own account, published 19 March 2024 by St. Martin's Press: Ford's memoir of the life around the September 27 session, the suburban Washington childhood, the career in psychology and biostatistics, the surfing, the family, and the five years since, which Kirkus called an artful and honest account of sacrifice and survival.
Fortas, Abe. Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience. New York: New American Library, 1968.
The 1968 mass-market bestseller — a sitting Supreme Court justice telling a nation on fire when law-breaking protest is defensible and when it isn't.
Read it →Foskett, Ken. Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas. New York: William Morrow, 2004.
A balanced journalistic biography by an Atlanta reporter who interviewed Thomas and those around him — strong on the Pin Point, Georgia origins and the long road to the Court.
Read it →Frank, David A., and Francis J. Mootz III, eds. The Rhetoric of Judging Well: The Conflicted Legacy of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023.
The major post-retirement scholarly volume — fifteen scholars on Romer, Casey, and Obergefell, on 'the sweet mystery of life,' and on the blind spots.
Find a copy →Frank, John P. Clement Haynsworth, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.
The 1969 defeat of Nixon's first nominee for the Fortas seat, told at book length twenty years on, with a fourteen-page bibliography, from the University Press of Virginia.
Read it →Frank, John P. Justice Daniel Dissenting: A Biography of Peter V. Daniel, 1784–1860. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.
Daniel dissented against corporations, banks, admiralty, federal roads — against the nineteenth century itself — with a consistency no colleague matched.
Find a copy →Frank, John P. Marble Palace: The Supreme Court in American Life. New York: Knopf, 1958.
The Court as an institution explained for the general reader in 1958 by John P. Frank, Black's former clerk and biographer; reprinted by Greenwood in 1972.
Read it →Frank, John P. Mr. Justice Black: The Man and His Opinions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
The first full-length study of Black, written by his own former law clerk with an introduction by Charles Beard — the book that started Black scholarship, published while the justice still had two decades to serve.
Frank, John P. The Warren Court. New York: Macmillan, 1964.
Friedman and Israel's source for 'a valuable survey of Clark's life to 1964': Frank's portrait volume of the sitting Court, with Karsh's photographs, written by the man whose Vinson appraisal is two entries above.
Read it →Frank, John P. “Fred Vinson and the Chief Justiceship.” University of Chicago Law Review 21 (1954): 212.
John P. Frank's 1954 appraisal of Fred Vinson's Chief Justiceship, 21 University of Chicago Law Review 212, which Friedman and Israel list in their chapters on Vinson, Minton and Clark; not found online, known through Kurland's review of the same year, and not read.
Frank, Walter M. Making Sense of the Constitution: A Primer on the Supreme Court and Its Struggle to Apply Our Fundamental Law. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.
Walter M. Frank's primer on constitutional law and why the Court divides so closely, moving from the Constitution and the amendments in historical context to doctrinal development, decision-making and the interpretation debate, and closing on six contested areas including abortion, affirmative action and campaign finance; Southern Illinois University Press, March 2012, 328 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Frankfurter, Felix, and James M. Landis. The Business of the Supreme Court: A Study in the Federal Judicial System. New York: Macmillan, 1928.
The foundational study of the federal judicial system, written with his protégé James Landis — a dense institutional history of the Court's jurisdiction and workload that launched a whole field and is still a starting point in it.
Read it →Frankfurter, Felix. Law and Politics: Occasional Papers of Felix Frankfurter, 1913–1938. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
Twenty-five years of the professor's occasional writing, 1913 to 1938, gathered by MacLeish and Prichard the year he went on the Court: his own voice before the robe.
Read it →Frankfurter, Felix. Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938.
Frankfurter's three public lectures on Holmes at Harvard in April 1938, on property and society, civil liberties and the federal system, given months before Roosevelt named him to the seat Holmes had held.
Read it →Frankfurter, Felix. Of Law and Life and Other Things That Matter: Papers and Addresses of Felix Frankfurter, 1956–1963. Edited by Philip B. Kurland. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965.
The last gathering, the papers and addresses of the final seven years to the stroke and the retirement, edited by Philip Kurland for the Belknap Press in 1965, the year Frankfurter died: 284 pages, the third volume of the extrajudicial writing after Law and Politics and Of Law and Men.
Read it →Frankfurter, Felix. Of Law and Men: Papers and Addresses of Felix Frankfurter, 1939–1956. Edited by Philip Elman. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.
The off-the-bench writing of the first seventeen years on it, gathered by Philip Elman and published by Harcourt, Brace in 1956: 364 pages of papers and addresses, the sequel to Law and Politics.
Read it →Frankfurter, Felix. The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen. Boston: Little, Brown, 1927.
Frankfurter's own famous intervention — the Harvard professor's coolly devastating dissection of the trial, first an Atlantic Monthly article and then this book, which made him a national figure and a marked man to the Boston establishment.
Read it →Frankfurter, Felix. The Commerce Clause under Marshall, Taney and Waite. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937.
The historian's book, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1937, the year of the Court-packing fight: three Chief Justices and one clause, the commerce power as it was read from 1801 to 1888, by the man who would join the Court two years later and read it himself.
Read it →Frankfurter, Felix. The Public and Its Government. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930.
The professor's Yale lectures of 1930, 170 pages from the Yale University Press, nine years before the Court: Frankfurter on the public and its government before there was a New Deal.
Read it →Frankfurter, Felix. “Mr. Justice Roberts.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 104 (1955): 311.
The primary document of the switch controversy: Frankfurter's memorial essay publishing Roberts's own posthumous memorandum explaining his 1937 votes.
Read it →Frederick Moore Vinson Papers — University of Kentucky Libraries, Special Collections Research Center (finding aid). Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Libraries, 1864–1953.
The papers: 166 cubic feet from forty years of public life, in series for the House, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Emergency Court of Appeals, the Office of Economic Stabilization, Bretton Woods, the Federal Loan Administration, War Mobilization and Reconversion, the Treasury and the Supreme Court, with speeches, clippings and photographs.
Find a copy →Frederick, David C. Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy: Mastering Oral Argument. St. Paul, MN: Thomson/West, 2003.
A practitioner's manual on oral argument at the Court and the courts of appeals, with a foreword by Justice Ginsburg; West, 2003.
Read it →Freedman, Max, ed. Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928–1945. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
The extraordinary FDR–Frankfurter letters — the professor as presidential adviser, talent scout, and sounding board, documenting an intimacy with power almost unimaginable for a soon-to-be and then sitting justice.
Read it →Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
The study of the honour code in the politics of the 1790s, in which the Livingston-Jones affair of May 1798 is an example of how an insult became a killing: the Argus squib, the caning on the Battery, and, in Freeman's words, 'so serious an affront that it prompted a discussion about precisely how much of Livingston's nose had been grabbed.'
Read it →Freund, Paul A. On Understanding the Supreme Court. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949.
Freund's Rosenthal lectures at Northwestern in April 1949, 130 pages on how to read the Court, from the Harvard professor Paul Freund.
Read it →Freyer, Tony Allan. The Passenger Cases and the Commerce Clause: Immigrants, Blacks, and States' Rights in Antebellum America. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014.
Tony Freyer on the Passenger Cases of 1849, five to four with eight separate opinions, on whether a state could tax or regulate arriving immigrants and free Black people, and on how the fracture fed the Compromise of 1850 and Dred Scott; Kansas, September 2014, 216 pages, in the Landmark Law Cases series. Not read.
Freyer, Tony. Hugo L. Black and the Dilemma of American Liberalism. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
A compact interpretive biography (Library of American Biography) framing Black around the central tension of twentieth-century liberalism — majoritarian democracy against individual rights.
Read it →Friedman, Barry. The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Barry Friedman's history of public opinion and the Court from the founding to 2005, arguing that for all their life tenure the justices have always answered to the public, which has disciplined them by abolishing judgeships and threatening to pack the bench; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2009, 624 pages. Not read.
Friedman, Edward L. “Mr. Justice Harlan.” Notre Dame Lawyer 30 (1955): 349.
The appointment appraisal, by a lawyer in the New York Telephone Company's legal department, written in the spring of 1955: three decades of corporate and appellate litigation in New York, the war, the eight months on the Second Circuit, and the advocate's gift: 'His principal asset was his ability to make sense to the Court, no matter how complex the issue.'
Read it →Friedman, Leon, and Fred L. Israel, eds. The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions. New York: Chelsea House, 1969.
The standard reference set, and for many of the justices no one has written a book about, the fullest connected account of the life in print.
Read it →Friedman, Leon, comp. Obscenity: The Complete Oral Arguments before the Supreme Court in the Major Obscenity Cases. New York: Chelsea House, 1970.
The complete oral arguments in seven obscenity cases, Roth and Alberts through Jacobellis, Freedman and Ginzburg, transcribed in 1970 with an introduction by Charles Rembar.
Read it →Friendly, Fred W. Minnesota Rag: The Dramatic Story of the Landmark Supreme Court Case That Gave New Meaning to Freedom of the Press. New York: Random House, 1981.
How a bigoted Minnesota scandal sheet, shut down under the state's gag law and bankrolled on appeal by the Chicago Tribune's Colonel McCormick, produced Near v. Minnesota and the rule against prior restraint.
Read it →Friendly, Fred W., and Martha J. H. Elliott. The Constitution, That Delicate Balance. New York: Random House, 1984.
Fred Friendly's landmark cases for the general reader, speech, press, religion and due process, with the text of the Constitution; Random House, 1984.
Read it →Gal, Allon. Brandeis of Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
The study of the formative Boston decades — the corporate lawyer's transformation into the 'People's Lawyer,' the fights over insurance, railroads, and monopoly that made his name before Woodrow Wilson sent him to the Court.
Read it →Garbus, Martin. The Next 25 Years: The New Supreme Court and What It Means for Americans. Seven Stories Press, 2007.
Martin Garbus projecting the consequences of the Roberts and Alito appointments across a generation of constitutional law; Seven Stories Press, February 2007, 256 pages, a trial lawyer's warning rather than a study. Not read.
Garland, A. H. Experience in the Supreme Court of the United States, with Some Reflections and Suggestions as to That Tribunal. Washington, DC: John Byrne & Co., 1898.
A hundred pages of reflections on the Court from Augustus Hill Garland, who won Ex parte Garland there in 1867, served as Cleveland's Attorney General from 1885 to 1889, and died in the courtroom arguing a case a year after the book appeared; public domain and free to read.
Read it →Garraty, John A., ed. Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Historians' essays on the great cases, edited by John A. Garraty for Harper & Row in 1964: the landmark decisions told as the human quarrels they began as.
Read it →Garrison, Arthur H. Supreme Court Jurisprudence in Times of National Crisis, Terrorism, and War: A Historical Perspective. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.
Arthur Garrison's chronological account of the Court in wartime and national emergency from Washington to George W. Bush, taking in the Hamilton and Madison debates and the Taney and Bates dispute over presidential power, and arguing that the judiciary has defended the rule of law across two centuries; Lexington Books, April 2011, 481 pages. Not read.
Garrow, David J. Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade. New York: Macmillan, 1994.
Garrow, David J. “How Roe v. Wade Was Written.” Washington and Lee Law Review 71 (2014): 893.
The drafting history from the papers: Blackmun's drafts, the colleagues' memoranda, and the argument over the cutoff point, by the historian of Liberty and Sexuality.
Find a copy →Gass, Edmond C. “The Constitutional Opinions of Justice John Catron.” East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications 8 (1936): 54–73.
Gellman, David N. Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.
A valuable modern study of the most complicated part of Jay's legacy: his involvement in antislavery activity while he and his family remained connected to slavery.
Find a copy →Gerber, Scott Douglas, ed. Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John Marshall (the Rutledge chapter). 1998.
The most useful scholarly judicial context — an essay on each major pre-Marshall justice, reconstructing the constitutional ideas they brought to the early Court.
Find a copy →Gerber, Scott Douglas. "Deconstructing William Cushing." In Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John Marshall (1998).
The best modern starting point.
Find a copy →Gerber, Scott Douglas. First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
The early study of Thomas's constitutional method — Gerber's argument that a coherent 'liberal originalism,' rooted in the natural-rights principles of the Declaration, runs through his opinions.
Read it →Gerhart, Eugene C. America's Advocate: Robert H. Jackson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958.
The standard biography, written soon after Jackson's death by a lawyer who admired him.
Find a copy →Getman, Julius G. The Supreme Court on Unions: Why Labor Law Is Failing American Workers. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2016.
Julius Getman, emeritus at Texas, on sixty years of labour decisions, organising, bargaining, strikes, picketing, boycotts and arbitration, and on a Court he says has reshaped the National Labor Relations Act into a statute that sustains employer authority; ILR Press, 2016, 227 pages. Not read.
Gibson, James L., and Gregory A. Caldeira. Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations: Positivity Theory and the Judgments of the American People. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
The confirmation wars from the public's side: a national survey fielded around the Alito nomination, the finding that exposure to the Court tends to reinforce its legitimacy, and a warning that partisan fights treating it as just another political institution spend down the one asset it uniquely holds.
Read it →Gibson, Larry S. Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012.
The definitive account of the formation — the Baltimore boyhood, Lincoln University, and the Howard Law years under Charles Hamilton Houston that turned Marshall into a lawyer.
Read it →Gillman, Howard, and Cornell Clayton, eds. The Supreme Court in American Politics: New Institutionalist Interpretations. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999.
The Kansas half of the pair that named the new institutionalism in Court studies, 302 illustrated pages from 1999 catalogued under decision making; its Chicago twin of the same year is on this shelf beside it. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, with Amanda L. Tyler. Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life's Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021.
The posthumously completed capstone — her writings, speeches, and a landmark 2019 conversation with the Berkeley law professor Amanda Tyler on the equal-protection campaign she built as an advocate.
Read it →Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. My Own Words. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
A collection of Ginsburg's own writings and speeches, spanning from childhood editorials to major opinions and dissents, with introductions by her authorized biographers.
Read it →Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. “Remembering Justice White.” University of Colorado Law Review 74 (2003): 1283.
His successor's tribute, from the Colorado symposium: the 400 marshals in Alabama, 'putting him out to pasture mighty early,' the retirement letter ('Marion and I think that someone else should be permitted to have a like experience'), the chambers manual he handed her, the count of 1,275 opinions, and her answer to the Senate on how she might be like him.
Find a copy →Gitenstein, Mark. Matters of Principle: An Insider's Account of America's Rejection of Robert Bork's Nomination to the Supreme Court. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
The Bork fight from inside the Senate Judiciary Committee, by the chief counsel who served through the 1987 hearings; Simon & Schuster, 1992, 368 pages. HathiTrust holds it search-only and no free copy was found; not read.
Gizzi, Michael C., and R. Craig Curtis. The Fourth Amendment in Flux: The Roberts Court, Crime Control, and Digital Privacy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016.
Michael Gizzi and R. Craig Curtis on search-and-seizure doctrine stretched over cell phones, GPS trackers, drones and wiretaps, with Scalia's shifting position and the effect of the Obama appointments; Kansas, 2016, 188 pages. Not read.
Glad, Betty. Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence: A Study in American Diplomacy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1966.
The study of Hughes the diplomat — his years as Harding and Coolidge's Secretary of State, the Washington Naval Conference, and the 'illusions' Glad argues shaped an idealistic American approach to a dangerous world.
Read it →Glen, Patrick J. “Harvard and Yale Ascendant: The Legal Education of the Justices From Holmes to Kagan.” UCLA Law Review Discourse 58 (2010): 129–154.
Twenty-six pages in the UCLA Law Review's online companion, and the useful half is one dateable fact: the Ivy League's grip on the Court is recent, not ancient, and Kagan in 2010 was the first bench of nine to be entirely Ivy-trained. Frozen at that moment, though, and answered by events: Glen closes by urging the president to look outside Harvard and Yale, which is what happened in 2020. Its eight-page appendix relists the whole Court at every nomination since 1902, so Holmes appears in it dozens of times, and it counts only law-school graduates, which drops 64 of the 116 justices out of its own subject.
Read it →Glennon, Robert J., Jr. “Justice Henry Billings Brown: Values in Tension.” University of Colorado Law Review 44 (1973): 553–606.
The one significant scholarly study of Brown as a whole jurist rather than as Plessy's author — the comfortable Yankee moderate whose 'values in tension' produced both the era's worst opinion and a surprisingly progressive record on labor and admiralty.
Read it →Glidden, William B. The Supreme Court Versus Congress: Disrupting the Balance of Power, 1789-2014. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2015.
William Glidden surveys every invalidation of an act of Congress on constitutional grounds from 1789 to 2014 and argues that upholding the statutes would generally have protected rights better than striking them down; Praeger, March 2015, 250 pages. Not read.
Gochman, Lisa Sarnoff. At the Altar of the Appellate Gods: Arguing before the US Supreme Court. Bloomington, IN: Red Lightning Books, 2022.
Lisa Sarnoff Gochman, a New Jersey deputy attorney general, on preparing and arguing Apprendi v. New Jersey, from the shooting that began it to the exchanges with Scalia and Ginsburg at the lectern; Red Lightning Books, October 2022, 232 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Goebel, Julius, Jr. Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 1). New York: Macmillan, 1971.
The opening volume of the Holmes Devise history, running from the traditions behind Article III through the Judiciary Act of 1789 to the Court's first decade, with a statistical appendix on its early business.
Goff, John S. "Mr. Justice Trimble of the United States Supreme Court." Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 58, no. 1 (1960): 6–28.
The standard account: the Virginia birth and Kentucky frontier boyhood, the rise through the land-title bar to the state's highest court, the offices he reportedly declined because judging paid less than practice, nine years as federal district judge, and the two-term Supreme Court career cut off by sudden death at fifty-one.
Goings, Kenneth W. The NAACP Comes of Age: The Defeat of Judge John J. Parker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
The NAACP's campaign against Judge John J. Parker's nomination in 1930 and the Senate's rejection of it, with appendixes and a bibliography; Indiana University Press, 1990. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Goldberg, Arthur J. Equal Justice: The Warren Era of the Supreme Court. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971.
Goldberg's Rosenthal Lectures — the ex-justice's own defense of the Warren Court he served, including the argument against the death penalty he had pressed from the bench in Rudolph v. Alabama.
Find a copy →Goldberg, Arthur J. “Death and the Supreme Court.” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 15 (1987): 1.
His own account, twenty-four years on, of the 1963 memorandum urging the Court to take up the death penalty, the Rudolph v. Alabama dissent, and what became of the argument after Furman and Gregg, ending with the case that legislatures and governors retain the power to abolish.
Read it →Goldberg, Arthur J.; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ed. The Defenses of Freedom: The Public Papers of Arthur J. Goldberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Goldberg's public papers — labor lawyer, Secretary of Labor, justice, UN ambassador — edited, remarkably, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Goldman, Roger L., and David Gallen. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.: Freedom First. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994.
A short biographical study paired with generous selections from Brennan's major opinions — a convenient one-volume way to meet both the man and the work.
Read it →Goldman, Sheldon. Picking Federal Judges: Lower Court Selection from Roosevelt through Reagan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
The lower courts' counterpart to Abraham and the standard work on selection below the Supreme Court: nine presidencies of appointments, Roosevelt through Reagan, from archives, interviews and statistical profiles of the appointees. On a site that ranks the circuit bench by measured ideology, this is the book on how that bench was picked.
Read it →Goldstein, Leslie F. The U.S. Supreme Court and Racial Minorities: Two Centuries of Judicial Review on Trial. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017.
Leslie Goldstein, emerita at Delaware, sets two centuries of decisions on Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans against the elected branches' record in the same years rather than against an ideal; Edward Elgar, July 2017, 461 pages. Not read.
Goldstone, Lawrence. Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903. Walker & Company, 2011.
Lawrence Goldstone on the Reconstruction promise undone between 1865 and 1903: the Civil Rights Act of 1875 struck down eight to one in 1883, Plessy, and the lesser-known decisions that made Jim Crow possible, with the argument that the Court favoured the business establishment over the reality of racism; Walker, January 2011, 256 pages. Not read.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
Half of Goodwin's 900-page epic is a full Taft biography — the most widely read treatment of the man in half a century, carrying him from Cincinnati through the presidency to the 1912 rupture with Roosevelt.
Find a copy →Gordan, John D., III. The Fugitive Slave Rescue Trial of Robert Morris: Benjamin Robbins Curtis on the Road to Dred Scott. Clark, NJ: Talbot Publishing, 2013.
The only book-length Curtis study besides Streichler — his 1851 work enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston, prosecuting the rescuers of Shadrach Minkins.
Find a copy →Gordon, Ann D. The Trial of Susan B. Anthony. Washington, DC: Federal Judicial Center, 2005.
Hunt's one appearance on history's stage — on the wrong side of it — told authoritatively and free.
Read it →Gorsuch, Neil M. A Republic, If You Can Keep It. New York: Crown Forum, 2019.
Gorsuch in his own words — on textualism, the role of courts, and the constitutional order.
Find a copy →Gorsuch, Neil M. The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Gorsuch's only academic monograph — the book of his Oxford doctorate, arguing against legalization from the intrinsic value of human life.
Find a copy →Gorsuch, Neil M., with Janie Nitze. Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law. New York: Harper, 2024.
His second book, and the fullest statement of his broader worldview: an argument, through human stories, that a country buried under too many laws and regulations loses liberty and dignity in the process.
Find a copy →Gostin, Larry, ed. “Justice Harry A. Blackmun: The Supreme Court and the Limits of Medical Privacy.” American Journal of Law and Medicine 13, nos. 2–3 (1987): 153–525.
Martin and Goehlert index three articles out of this issue as though they were unrelated; they are three of thirteen pieces in a symposium devoted to Blackmun, and the two they leave out are the two you would most want — a tribute by Brennan and Remarks by Blackmun himself.
Find a copy →Gottlieb, Stephen E. Morality Imposed: The Rehnquist Court and Liberty in America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
The case, made in 2000, that the Rehnquist Court's majority was writing its own morality into the law of liberty: the Library of Congress catalogs it under Rehnquist, the Court, and 'Law and ethics.'
Read it →Gottlieb, Stephen E. Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2016.
Stephen Gottlieb of Albany Law argues that constitutional interpretation without a concern for preserving democratic government is incoherent, and tests the Roberts Court's decisions against the experience of India, South Africa and Eastern Europe; NYU Press, January 2016, 410 pages. Not read.
Gould, Lewis L. Chief Executive to Chief Justice: Taft betwixt the White House and Supreme Court. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014.
The study of the interregnum — Taft's years out of office (1913–1921) as a Yale professor and public man, campaigning quietly for the Chief Justiceship he had wanted all along and finally won from Harding.
Graber, Mark A. Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
The major revisionist study — Graber's unsettling case that Taney's opinion was a plausible reading of a Constitution that really did protect slavery, which makes the evil constitutional rather than judicial.
Read it →Graetz, Michael J., and Linda Greenhouse. The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.
The best single book for understanding the Burger years, and the natural entry point given the absence of a finished Burger biography.
Read it →Graves, Lisa. Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights. New York: Bold Type Books, 2025.
A prosecutor's brief against Roberts, published 30 September 2025 by Bold Type Books: Graves, who was chief counsel for nominations to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a witness at its 2021 hearing on money and the Court, argues that the Chief has led a rightward transformation in the service of billionaire-backed interests, and proposes judicial reforms to answer what she calls the most corrupt Court in American history.
Find a copy →Gray, Horace, and John Lowell. A Legal Review of the Case of Dred Scott, as Decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1857.
Gray at twenty-nine, with John Lowell, taking Taney's opinion apart in the Law Reporter for June 1857, three months after the decision; reprinted the same year by Crosby, Nichols of Boston in sixty-two pages.
Read it →Gray, Horace. An Address on the Life, Character and Influence of Chief Justice Marshall. Washington, DC: Pearson Printing Office, 1901.
Gray's Marshall Day address, delivered at Richmond on 4 February 1901, the centenary of Marshall's taking the oath, at the request of the Virginia bar associations, and printed in Washington in sixty-two pages with the authorities consulted listed at the end: the Court's historian-judge on its greatest Chief Justice, the year before his own death.
Read it →Green, Steven K. The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Steven K. Green on the long arc from the nineteenth-century fights over the Bible in the common schools to the mid-twentieth-century decisions on released time and school prayer, and what that history made of modern church-state doctrine; Oxford, February 2012, 304 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Greenburg, Jan Crawford. Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court. New York: Penguin Press, 2007.
The inside story of the conservative campaign to remake the Court that produced Roberts's own appointment — Jan Crawford Greenburg's well-sourced account of the nominations from Reagan through Roberts and Alito.
Read it →Greene, Meg. Elena Kagan: A Biography. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2014.
A library-market life of Kagan: Meg Greene on Princeton, law school, the academic and government career and the solicitor generalship, written for high school, college and general readers.
Greenhouse, Linda. Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey. New York: Times Books, 2005.
The first book written from Blackmun's newly opened papers, and still the best introduction to the man and his transformation.
Find a copy →Greenhouse, Linda. Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court. New York: Random House, 2021.
Linda Greenhouse's month-by-month chronicle of the twelve months from Ginsburg's death and Barrett's arrival, by the reporter who covered the Court for the New York Times for four decades; Random House, November 2021, 336 pages, retitled A Requiem for the Supreme Court in the 2022 paperback. Not read.
Find a copy →Greenhouse, Linda. The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Linda Greenhouse's 160-page introduction to the Court in its third edition, revised for the conservative supermajority and the rulings of the Obama and Trump years; Oxford, September 2023. Not read.
Find a copy →Greenhouse, Linda. “A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent.” The New York Review of Books (2022).
Greenhouse on the Parents Involved dissent, reviewing Breyer's own 2022 book about it, Breaking the Promise of Brown: the argument that striking the Seattle and Louisville plans betrayed Brown, and why the dissent was forgotten.
Find a copy →Greenya, John. Gorsuch: The Judge Who Speaks for Himself. New York: Threshold Editions, 2018.
The closest thing to a biography currently available, published shortly after his confirmation.
Find a copy →Greenya, John. Silent Justice: The Clarence Thomas Story. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2001.
The other biography of 2001, from a Washington writer, published by Barricade Books in Fort Lee: 313 pages with an index, catalogued under the Court's biography.
Read it →Grier, Robert C. Letter to President-elect James Buchanan, February 23, 1857. James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Days later the president-elect piously promised at his inauguration to submit to a decision he already knew.
Find a copy →Gronlund, Mimi Clark. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark: A Life of Service. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.
An affectionate, well-researched biography by Clark's daughter, drawing on family papers and personal memory.
Find a copy →Gugin, Linda C. & James E. St. Clair. Sherman Minton: New Deal Senator, Cold War Justice. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 1997.
The definitive biography, by the authors who also wrote the standard life of Fred Vinson.
Find a copy →Guitton, Stephanie, and Peter Irons, eds. Arguments on Abortion: Live Recordings and Transcripts of Supreme Court Oral Arguments on Reproductive Rights. New York: The New Press, 1995.
The sequel box in the May It Please the Court series: eight arguments on reproductive rights, Griswold and Roe through Casey, on two cassettes, with a 214-page book of transcripts, decision excerpts and a chronology.
Gunther, Gerald. Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Gutgold, Nichola D. The Rhetoric of Supreme Court Women: From Obstacles to Options. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012.
A communication scholar's rhetorical study of the first four women on the Court, reading O'Connor, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan through confirmation testimony, opinions, public lectures and interviews.
Haines, Charles Grove, and Foster H. Sherwood. The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government and Politics, 1835–1864. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.
The second and last volume of Haines's study, 1835 to 1864, finished by Foster H. Sherwood and published by the University of California Press in 1957, nine years after Haines's death; the Da Capo reprint of 1973 can be borrowed at the Internet Archive. Not read.
Read it →Haines, Charles Grove. The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government and Politics, 1789–1835. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944.
The Court's first half-century read from an avowedly Jeffersonian standpoint, treating Marshall's judicial review as one arm of a Federalist project to centralize national power.
Find a copy →Hall, A. Oakey. “Justice Samuel Blatchford.” The Green Bag 5, no. 11 (November 1893): 489–492.
Four pages by a former mayor of New York who knew him, written four months after his death — the only near-contemporary magazine profile, and the single item the Federal Judicial Center's own scholarship bibliography lists for Blatchford.
Read it →Hall, Kermit L. & Mark David Hall, eds. Collected Works of James Wilson (2 vols.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007.
The principal modern collection of Wilson's writings: revolutionary pamphlets, constitutional arguments, ratification speeches, law lectures, and judicial materials, with a scholarly introduction.
Read it →Hall, Kermit L. A Comprehensive Bibliography of American Constitutional and Legal History, 1896–1979. Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1984.
The deepest of the finding aids: five volumes and 3,443 pages covering the whole literature of American constitutional and legal history from 1896 to 1979, priced at $650 on publication and aimed squarely at scholars, with a two-volume supplement in 1991 carrying it to 1987.
Hall, Kermit L., et al., eds. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
More than a thousand entries on cases, justices, doctrines, and concepts, the second edition taking in the 800-odd decisions handed down since the first — the one-volume desk reference to reach for first.
Read it →Hall, Mark David. "James Wilson: Democratic Theorist and Supreme Court Justice." In Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John Marshall (1998).
The best concise, Court-centered introduction — connecting Wilson's theory of popular sovereignty to his circuit duties and early opinions, especially Chisholm v. Georgia.
Find a copy →Hall, Mark David. The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson, 1742–1798. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
The best systematic study of Wilson's ideas.
Find a copy →Hall, Matthew E. K. The Nature of Supreme Court Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Matthew Hall's argument that the Court gets its way when lower courts can carry out its rulings directly, and that where implementation depends on anyone else the decision's popularity determines whether it takes effect; Cambridge, December 2010, 264 pages. Not read.
Hall, Matthew E. K. What Justices Want: Goals and Personality on the U.S. Supreme Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Matthew Hall of Notre Dame joins personality psychology to rational choice, measuring the big-five traits of the justices of 1946 to 2015 from their words and showing how the traits weight the goals each pursues; Cambridge, August 2018, 214 pages. Not read.
Hall, Timothy L. Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Facts on File, 2001.
A one-volume biographical dictionary of every justice to Breyer, 566 pages with portraits and a thirty-page bibliography; Facts on File, 2001. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Halpern, Stephen C., and Charles M. Lamb, eds. Supreme Court Activism and Restraint. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1982.
Activism and restraint as a collection of essays, 436 illustrated pages from Lexington Books in 1982, catalogued as addresses, essays and lectures on the Court and on judicial process; the editors went on to profile the Burger Court in 1991. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Hamilton, Virginia Van der Veer. Hugo Black: The Alabama Years. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.
The essential book on the formation — the Alabama boyhood, the police-court judge and prosecutor, the Klan membership, and the New Deal senator, all before the 1937 appointment that shocked the country.
Read it →Hansford, Thomas G., and James F. Spriggs II. The Politics of Precedent on the U.S. Supreme Court. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Thomas Hansford and James Spriggs on how the Court treats its own precedents, from interpreting them favourably to narrowing and overruling them, built on the Court's handling of precedent from 1946 to 1999; Princeton, 2006, 155 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Harlan, John M. What Part Does the Oral Argument Play. Cornell Law Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1955): 6–11.
A sitting justice’s answer, six pages long: there is no substitute for the Socratic exchange “in getting at the real heart of an issue,” argument is “perhaps the most effective weapon you have got,” and — from a diary Harlan kept of his own impressions — the view he held at the end of the argument day usually turned out to be the one he settled on.
Read it →Harlan, John M. “A Glimpse of the Supreme Court at Work.” University of Chicago Law School Record 11, no. 2 (1963).
The Seventh Ernst Freund Lecture at Chicago, printed in the law school's Record: Harlan on how the Court screens its cases under the 1925 Act and the certiorari standards, then argument, conference, the vote and the assignment, with the argument that the workload is better met by proper use of certiorari and a bar that understands the Court than by enlarging it or cutting its jurisdiction.
Read it →Harlan, John M. “Introduction” to Potter Stewart, “Robert H. Jackson's Influence on Federal-State Relationships.” Mr. Justice Jackson: Four Lectures in His Honor (1969).
The three pages Friedman and Israel call 'short but revealing': Harlan introducing Potter Stewart's lecture on Robert Jackson and federalism, and using the occasion to say that the Court had gone from enlarging federal power in the 1930s and 1940s to restricting state authority under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1950s and 1960s, and that 'This shift must be recognized as involving something more than mere differences among judges as to where the line should be drawn between state and federal authority.'
Find a copy →Harlan, John M. “Manning the Dikes: Some Comments on the Statutory Certiorari Jurisdiction and Jurisdictional Statement Practice of the Supreme Court of the United States.” Record of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York 13 (1958): 541.
The Eighteenth Cardozo Lecture, given to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York on October 28, 1958, on how the Court takes in its cases: the statutory certiorari jurisdiction and the jurisdictional-statement practice, with an introduction by Ernest A. Gross.
Harlan, John M. “The Bill of Rights and the Constitution.” American Bar Association Journal 50 (1964): 918.
A 1964 piece in the bar's journal, cited by Lewis Maddocks in his 1979 study of the two Harlans on civil rights and liberties.
Harlan, John M. “Thoughts at a Dedication: Keeping the Judicial Function in Balance.” American Bar Association Journal 49 (1963): 943.
The dedication address that his readers treat as the statement of his method: Charles Fried quotes it on those who doubt the federal system's adequacy, a 2021 Belmont Law Review rehearing of his method cites it for its defence of the common-law way of developing constitutional doctrine, and David Shapiro reprinted it in The Evolution of a Judicial Philosophy at page 289.
Harlan, Malvina Shanklin. Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854–1911. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
The justice's wife's memoir, written in 1915 and lost for nearly a century until it surfaced in the Supreme Court Historical Society's journal and was published as a book with an introduction by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Read it →Harold H. Burton Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1792–1965.
The papers, and the reason Burton matters to historians of his Court more than his opinions suggest: the finding aid notes that 'Burton's diaries begin in 1941 and continue through 1963 covering his service as senator and associate justice,' the daily record Mary Frances Berry's 1978 study was built on.
Read it →Harper, Fowler V. Justice Rutledge and the Bright Constellation. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
The first study of Rutledge, by his friend the law professor Fowler Harper — an admiring account of the New Deal liberal who died at fifty-five after only six years on the Court.
Read it →Harrington, Matthew P. Jay and Ellsworth, The First Courts: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008.
The ABC-CLIO handbook for the first two Courts, Jay's and Ellsworth's, on a bench with no precedent to work from that had to invent judicial review and separation of powers as it went, and that used its authority to strengthen the new national government rather than act as a neutral arbiter; Matthew Harrington, ABC-CLIO, May 2008, 309 pages. Not read.
Harrison, Richard A. “Henry Brockholst Livingston.” Princetonians, 1769–1775: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 397–407.
The fullest account of the early life in print and the closest thing to the biography Dunne said was yet to be written: Princeton (the Latin prize, the turkeys, the 1774 oration on 'Liberty'), Schuyler's staff and the Gates quarrel ('a man whom I abhor from my very soul'), Spain with Jay told against him ('Livingston divulged all confidential information to his friends'), the capture at sea, the name shortened 'For the sake of distinction,' the 1785 attempt read as the price of the Littlepage pamphlet war, the turn from Federalism dated to 1791, the 1798 duel and the coroner's jury, Clinton's 1802 appointment, the Court years with the count of thirty-nine, five and three, the letters to Story, the War of 1812, three marriages and eleven children; then two pages of sources down to the manuscript letters at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Harry A. Blackmun Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1913–2001.
The finding aid to the collection whose opening in 2004 the Library's own bulletin announced: 530,800 items in 1,576 containers, the Eighth Circuit years from 1959 and the Supreme Court years 1970 to 1994, with the video oral history the Library also put online.
Read it →Harry, Robert H. “Byron White: The Practicing Lawyer.” University of Colorado Law Review 75 (2004): 203.
The Denver years, 1947-1960, from inside the firm that became Davis, Graham & Stubbs: the clients, the cases, and 'the hardest working lawyer in the firm.'
Read it →Hart, Albert Bushnell. Salmon Portland Chase. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
The classic life, from Houghton Mifflin's American Statesmen series, by the eminent Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart.
Read it →Hart, James. The U.S. Supreme Court in American Society: Historical Perspectives. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2025.
A short thematic history of the Court by era, with case summaries and judicial profiles, by James Hart, formerly of the Stetson and Denver law schools, which the Law Gazette's reviewer called readable and admirably short; Edward Elgar, 2025, 182 pages. Not read.
Hartley, Roger C. The Assault on American Labor Law: Unions before the Supreme Court, 1965-2025. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2026.
Roger C. Hartley of Catholic University reads nearly a hundred National Labor Relations Act decisions from 1965 to 2025 as a Court legislating against the statute's collectivist design; Massachusetts, 2026, 224 pages. Not read.
Harvey, Anna. A Mere Machine: The Supreme Court, Congress, and American Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
Anna Harvey's empirical claim that the Court defers substantially to congressional preferences in constitutional cases, and her cross-national argument that American rights owe less to judicial independence than is supposed; Yale, November 2013, 366 pages. Not read.
Hasen, Richard L. The Justice of Contradictions: Antonin Scalia and the Politics of Disruption. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.
The critical reckoning with the legacy — the election-law scholar Richard Hasen argues that Scalia's slashing style and disruptive method did as much to coarsen legal argument as his originalism did to reshape it.
Haskett, Richard C. "William Paterson, Attorney General of New Jersey: Public Office and Private Profit in the American Revolution." William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 7 (1950).
A focused archival study of Paterson's years as New Jersey's first attorney general — how public prosecution, private practice, wartime confiscation, and professional advancement overlapped in the Revolutionary state.
Find a copy →Haskins, George Lee, and Herbert A. Johnson. Foundations of Power: John Marshall, 1801–15 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 2). New York: Macmillan, 1981.
The second Holmes Devise volume, the first fourteen years of the Marshall Court in two parts, Haskins on the Court and Johnson on its work, which the Library of Congress says argue that Marshall's accomplishment was 'to establish the rule of law as the basis of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence'; Macmillan, 1981, reissued by Cambridge in 2009.
Read it →Haw, James, Francis F. Beirne, Rosamond R. Beirne & R. Samuel Jett. Stormy Patriot: The Life of Samuel Chase. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1980.
Written by four Maryland historians, Stormy Patriot follows Chase from provincial Annapolis and Revolutionary politics through the Continental Congress, state judgeships, Supreme Court service, and impeachment.
Find a copy →Haw, James. John & Edward Rutledge of South Carolina. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997.
The strongest modern account.
Find a copy →Haygood, Wil. Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
A dual narrative built around the 1967 confirmation hearings — the Southern senators' days of interrogation intercut with the life that had led Marshall to that table.
Read it →Hazelton, Morgan L. W., and Rachael K. Hinkle. Persuading the Supreme Court: The Significance of Briefs in Judicial Decision-Making. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2022.
More than twenty-five thousand party and amicus briefs filed between 1984 and 2015, matched to the opinions they produced and read by machine, with interviews with former clerks and advocates behind the numbers, by Morgan Hazelton and Rachael Hinkle; Kansas, August 2022, 296 pages. Not read.
Healy, Thomas. The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind — and Changed the History of Free Speech in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013.
The finest book on Holmes's most consequential change of heart.
Find a copy →Heath, James O. To Face Down Dixie: South Carolina's War on the Supreme Court in the Age of Civil Rights. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2017.
James Heath on South Carolina's three senators, Olin Johnston, Strom Thurmond and Ernest Hollings, fighting the Warren Court through judicial nominations across four presidencies, from Brown to the Marshall, Fortas and Haynsworth confirmations; LSU Press, December 2017, 327 pages. Not read.
Heffron, Paul T. “The Early Years of Justice Moody.” Essex Institute Historical Collections 123, no. 4 (1987): 309–330.
The study of Moody before Washington — the Essex County prosecutor (of Lizzie Borden, among others) who became Roosevelt's favorite reformer.
Heffron, Paul T. “Theodore Roosevelt and the Appointment of Mr. Justice Moody.” Vanderbilt Law Review 18, no. 2 (1965): 545–568.
The standard account of the closest presidential-justice relationship of the era — TR's Navy Secretary and trust-busting Attorney General, sent to the Court in 1906 to carry the Square Deal inside.
Heins, Marjorie. Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
Marjorie Heins on the anti-communist investigation of New York City's teachers and professors in the 1950s, the cases it sent to the Court, and the idea of academic freedom traced from the late nineteenth century to the present; NYU Press, February 2013, 384 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Hellman, Florence S., comp. The Supreme Court Issue: A Selected List of References. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1937.
The Library of Congress's own reading list for the court-packing fight: thirty-three leaves compiled by Florence S. Hellman as acting chief bibliographer in 1937, with a forty-two-page sequel under the same title in 1938. The third of the Division of Bibliography's Supreme Court lists on this shelf, after 1909 and 1924. Public domain; no scan reached. Not read.
Hellman, George S. Benjamin N. Cardozo: American Judge. New York: Whittlesey House, 1940.
The first biography, published two years after Cardozo's death by a friend and man of letters — affectionate and literary, thin on the law but rich on the shy, ascetic bachelor behind the opinions.
Read it →Hemingway, Mollie, and Carrie Severino. Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2019.
The conservative counter-narrative, by a journalist and a legal activist who defend Kavanaugh and portray the opposition to him as a coordinated campaign of character assassination.
Find a copy →Hemingway, Mollie. Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution. 2026.
One of two full-length Alito biographies published in April 2026, a fortnight after Canellos's, and the sympathetic one: Hemingway is a Federalist editor and co-author of the Kavanaugh book on his colleague's shelf, which readers should weigh.
Find a copy →Hendel, Samuel. Charles Evans Hughes and the Supreme Court. New York: King's Crown Press, 1951.
The standard study of Hughes the jurist — Samuel Hendel's analysis of the constitutional record across both tenures, from the Progressive-era associate justice to the Chief who steered the Court through 1937.
Read it →Hendricks, Nancy. Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life in American History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2020.
A library-market life of Ginsburg in ABC-CLIO's Women Making History series, published 4 November 2020, weeks after her death: 264 pages tracing the Brooklyn childhood, the Rutgers and Columbia years, the ACLU Women's Rights Project and the twenty-seven years on the Court against the history of women's equality.
Hendricks, Nancy. Sandra Day O'Connor: How an Arizona Cowgirl Became the First Woman Supreme Court Justice. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026.
A library-market life of O'Connor in Bloomsbury Academic's Women Making History series, published 2 April 2026: 288 pages by Nancy Hendricks, with Peg A. Lamphier and Rosanne Welch as series editors, tracing the ranch childhood and the career against the history of women's equality.
Hensley, Thomas R., Kathleen Hale, and Carl Snook. The Rehnquist Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006.
The ABC-CLIO handbook for the Rehnquist Court, covering 1986 to 2005 and the fourteen justices who served, by Thomas Hensley of Kent State with Kathleen Hale and Carl Snook; 443 pages, June 2006. It puts the question whether those years produced a conservative counter-revolution and answers that continuity prevailed. Not read.
Herda, D. J. Earl Warren: A Life of Truth and Justice. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2019.
A popular life of Warren published in December 2019, written from primary and unpublished sources, family recollections, photographs and diary extracts: the Scandinavian immigrant childhood, the corruption-fighting district attorney and reforming governor of California, then the chief justiceship, Brown and Miranda, and the Warren Commission at the end.
Hickox, Charles F., III, and Andrew C. Laviano. "William Paterson," Journal of Supreme Court History. 1992.
Find a copy →Higginbotham, Don, Donna E. Kelly, and Lang Baradell, eds. The Papers of James Iredell. 3 vols. Raleigh, NC: Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1976–2003.
The foundational modern primary-source edition, covering 1767–1789 with scholarly annotation.
Find a copy →Highsaw, Robert B. Edward Douglass White: Defender of the Conservative Faith. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
The standard biography, from LSU Press — fitting, since White never really left Louisiana.
Find a copy →Hill, Anita. Speaking Truth to Power. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
Hill's own telling, six years on: the Oklahoma farm childhood, the years working under Thomas at the Education Department and the EEOC, the 1991 testimony, and what it cost her afterward.
Hirsch, H. N. The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
The controversial psychobiography — a Freudian reading that traces Frankfurter's judicial rigidity and his hunger for approval to the wounds of personality, and argues the great liberal professor curdled into a defensive, embittered justice.
Hirshman, Linda. Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World. New York: Harper, 2015.
The intertwined story of the first two women on the Court — Hirshman on how the conservative O'Connor and the liberal Ginsburg, so different in method and temperament, together transformed the place of women in American law.
Read it →Hitt, Matthew P. Inconsistency and Indecision in the United States Supreme Court. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019.
Matthew Hitt of Colorado State on the Court's two incompatible duties, resolving disputes and keeping doctrine consistent, and on the institutional changes that made the modern Court choose consistency and a smaller docket; Michigan, May 2019, 234 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Hobson, Charles F. The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996.
The best short study of what Marshall actually did as a judge — written by the longtime editor of the Papers of John Marshall, who knew the working jurist from the inside of his own files.
Find a copy →Hockett, Jeffrey D. New Deal Justice: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Hugo L. Black, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert H. Jackson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996.
A systematic comparison of three Roosevelt appointees — Black, Frankfurter and Jackson — who agreed about the New Deal and then split bitterly over rights and restraint.
Read it →Hoeflich, Michael H., and Ross E. Davies, eds. The Black Book of Justice Holmes: Text Transcript and Commentary. Clark, NJ: Talbot Publishing, 2021.
Holmes kept a notebook he called the Black Book for more than fifty years, and this is it: the manuscript in facsimile with a facing transcription, edited by Michael Hoeflich of Kansas and Ross Davies of George Mason, with a foreword by Stephen McAllister and essays placing it in context.
Find a copy →Hoffer, Peter Charles, and N. E. H. Hull. Impeachment in America, 1635–1805. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
The standard scholarly history of early American impeachment — colonial precedents, state practice, and the federal experiments — culminating in the Chase trial.
Hoffer, Peter Charles, Williamjames Hull Hoffer, and N. E. H. Hull. The Supreme Court: An Essential History. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2018.
Peter Charles Hoffer, Williamjames Hull Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull's one-volume history of the Court, organised chapter by chapter around each Chief Justice and quoting the opinions at length; Kansas, October 2018, 510 pages, in a second edition that follows the first of 2007. Not read.
Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Supreme Court Footnote: A Surprising History. New York: New York University Press, 2024.
What the footnotes to the Court's opinions have carried, Chisholm v. Georgia to Dobbs, by Peter Charles Hoffer of Georgia; NYU Press, June 2024, 232 pages. Not read.
Hoffer, Williamjames Hull. The "Sick Chicken" Case: The US Supreme Court and the New Deal. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2025.
Schechter Poultry, the unanimous decision of 27 May 1935 that struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act, told by Williamjames Hull Hoffer of Seton Hall as a window on a country in depression; Kansas, February 2025, 228 pages, in the Landmark Law Cases & American Society series. Not read.
Hoffer, Williamjames Hull. “William Paterson and the National Jurisprudence: Two Draft Opinions on the Sedition Law of 1798 and the Federal Common Law.” Journal of Supreme Court History 22, no. 2 (1997): 36–50.
The only substantial modern study of Paterson's actual work as a justice — built on two draft opinions on the Sedition Act and the federal common law of crimes.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. The Common Law. Boston: Little, Brown, 1881.
The book that made him, and still the most famous sentence in American jurisprudence: 'The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.'
Read it →Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Collected Legal Papers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1920.
The essays and addresses gathered in 1920 by Harold Laski, whom the Internet Archive record credits beside Holmes; 316 pages from Harcourt, Brace, published while the Justice was seventy-nine and still sitting.
Read it →Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Speeches. Boston: Little, Brown, 1913.
The short book of the occasional speeches in the Little, Brown printing of 1913 that grew from the 1891 first edition; 128 pages.
Read it →Holt, Michael F. By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
The modern account of the disputed 1876 election: the improvised fifteen-member commission, five justices among them, and the party-line 8–7 that settled it.
Find a copy →Holt, Wythe. "John Blair: 'A Safe and Conscientious Judge.'". In Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John Marshall (1998).
The essential modern treatment.
Find a copy →Holzer, Henry Mark. The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991–2006: A Conservative's Perspective. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.
The opinions read by an admirer: Holzer's survey of the majority, concurring and dissenting opinions of the first fifteen terms, arranged by subject from the separation of powers to the Bill of Rights, with an appendix listing every opinion; McFarland, 2007, 244 pages, with a second edition carrying the count to 2011.
Read it →Hoogenboom, Ari & Herbert Ershkowitz, eds. "Levi Woodbury's 'Intimate Memoranda' of the Jackson Administration." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92, no. 4 (1968): 507–515.
A reminder that the Library of Congress archive is full of material like this, waiting for the biographer who never comes.
Find a copy →Horace Gray Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1845–1902.
Small and one-directional: 400 letters to Gray in two containers, on one reel of microfilm made in 1952 from originals then in the Court's own archives, which the Library says 'contain references to legal decisions and opinions in which Gray was interested or involved.'
Read it →Horace H. Lurton Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1860-1934.
A single container: 250 items, 0.4 linear feet and one reel of microfilm, 1860 to 1934 with the bulk from 1893 to 1915, the circuit years and the five on the Court.
Read it →Horner, Frederick. The History of the Blair, Banister, and Braxton Families Before and After the Revolution. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1898.
Martin and Goehlert list this as one of only three Blair items, so it is worth saying what it is: a 257-page family genealogy in five parts, of which chapter three — pages 64 to 80, with a portrait plate captioned ‘signer of the Constitution of the United States and associate justice United States Supreme Court’ — is the Justice.
Read it →Horwitz, Morton J. The Warren Court and the Democratic Constitution. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2024.
With a foreword by Erwin Chemerinsky; the standout recent Warren Court book.
Find a copy →Horwitz, Morton J. The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.
The great legal historian Morton Horwitz's brief, incisive synthesis of the Warren Court's jurisprudence — the best short book on why its expansion of rights amounted to a second Reconstruction.
Read it →Howard, J. Woodford, Jr. Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.
The best one-volume life, and a fair-minded one.
Find a copy →Howe, Mark DeWolfe, ed. Holmes–Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916–1935. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
The great correspondence — nearly twenty years of letters between the aging Holmes and the young English socialist Harold Laski, ranging over law, books, politics, and life with unmatched wit and candor.
Read it →Howe, Mark DeWolfe, ed. Holmes–Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874–1932 (2 vols.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941.
Less political fireworks than Laski, more law and more candor; many Holmes readers prefer it.
Find a copy →Howe, Mark DeWolfe, ed. Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1861–1864. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.
Holmes's Civil War letters and diary — the young officer of the Twentieth Massachusetts, thrice wounded, in his own voice at the source of everything.
Read it →Howe, Mark DeWolfe. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (2 vols.: The Shaping Years, 1841–1870; The Proving Years, 1870–1882). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.
The authorized biography, by Holmes's own secretary and literary executor — two magisterial volumes that carry him from Brahmin boyhood through the Civil War to the eve of the bench.
Read it →Hudson, David L., Jr. The Handy Supreme Court Answer Book: The History and Issues Explained. 2nd ed. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 2023.
Six hundred questions and answers on the Court's history, structure and cases by David L. Hudson Jr. of Belmont, a First Amendment scholar, in a second edition; Visible Ink, 2023, 448 pages. Not read.
Hudson, David L., Jr. The Rehnquist Court: Understanding Its Impact and Legacy. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.
David L. Hudson's survey of the Rehnquist Court's work across its major subject areas, written while he was a research attorney at the First Amendment Center; Praeger, 2007, 181 pages. Not read.
Hudspeth, Harvey G. “Howell Edmunds Jackson and the Making of Tennessee's First Native-born Supreme Court Justice.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 58 (1999): 140–155.
The main modern account of Jackson's improbable appointment — a Democrat named by Republican Benjamin Harrison — and of the two-year tenure that ended with his dying return for the income-tax rehearing in Pollock.
Huebner, Timothy S. “Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond—and before—Dred Scott.” Journal of American History 97, no. 1 (2010): 17–38.
The essential modern article and the engine of any fair verdict.
Find a copy →Huebner, Timothy S. The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790–1890. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999.
The fullest scholarly treatment of Catron in print — a chapter-length portrait inside Huebner's group study of the South's great state judges.
Find a copy →Huebner, Timothy S. The Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
An ABC-CLIO handbook on the Taney Court in four parts, the period, the justices, the major decisions and the legacy; xiii and 288 pages, 2003. No copy found online; not read.
Hughes, Charles Evans. Addresses of Charles Evans Hughes, 1906–1916. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1916.
The speeches of the governor and the first Court tenure, gathered by Putnam's in the year he resigned to run for President, with an introduction by Jacob Gould Schurman; a second edition of the 1908 Addresses and Papers, carried forward eight years.
Read it →Hughes, Charles Evans. Conditions of Progress in Democratic Government. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1910.
The reform governor's Yale lectures, 123 pages from the Yale University Press in 1910, the year Taft put him on the Court: Hughes on what democratic government needs to work, written by the man who had just spent four years making New York's do so.
Read it →Hughes, Charles Evans. “Roger Brooke Taney.” American Bar Association Journal 17 (1931).
Two sitting Chief Justices formally rehabilitating a predecessor — Hughes at the pendulum's far swing, Warren, of all people, renewing the absolution the year after Brown.
Hughes, Charles Evans. The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes. Edited by David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Hughes in his own words — the candid notes he wrote for his family, edited by David Danelski and Joseph Tulchin, covering the whole career with the reticence and precision that were his hallmark.
Read it →Hughes, Charles Evans. The Supreme Court of the United States: Its Foundation, Methods and Achievements. New York: Columbia University Press, 1928.
Hughes's own book on the institution he would soon lead again — the Columbia lectures he gave in the interval between his two tenures, a lucid insider's account of the Court's history, methods, and self-inflicted wounds (Dred Scott, the Legal Tender reversal).
Read it →Hulse, Carl. Confirmation Bias: Inside Washington's War Over the Supreme Court, from Scalia's Death to Justice Kavanaugh. New York: Harper, 2019.
Carl Hulse of the New York Times on the seat that stayed empty after Scalia's death, the Garland blockade, and the two confirmations that followed, reported from the participants; Harper, June 2019, 352 pages. Not read.
Hume, Robert J. Ethics and Accountability on the US Supreme Court: An Analysis of Recusal Practices. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017.
Robert Hume of Fordham on recusal at the Court, built from original datasets: the justices comply with the statute selectively, weighing ethics against the duty to sit, and recusals move outcomes less than the critics assume; SUNY Press, December 2017, 204 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Hutchinson, Dennis J. The Man Who Once Was Whizzer White: A Portrait of Justice Byron R. White. New York: Free Press, 1998.
The standard biography, by a legal scholar who clerked for White and knew him for decades.
Find a copy →Hutchinson, Dennis J. “The Ideal New Frontier Judge.” Supreme Court Review 1997: 373.
Hutchinson, Dennis J. “The Man Who Once Was Whizzer White.” Yale Law Journal 103 (1993): 43.
The article that became the book: the nickname's origin in a Denver Post sportswriter's line about a freshman game in 1934, 'an identification he did not seek, did not like and could not shake,' and the waitress who asked 'Aren't you "Whizzer" White?'
Read it →Hylton, J. Gordon. “The Perils of Popularity: David Josiah Brewer and the Politics of Judicial Reputation.” Vanderbilt Law Review 62, no. 2 (2009): 567.
Hylton's mature reassessment, from the Vanderbilt symposium on forgotten justices: how the most famous judge in America circa 1900 — lecturer, essayist, public moralist — became a Lochner-era punchline, and what the collapse says about how judicial reputations are made.
Read it →Hyneman, Charles S. The Supreme Court on Trial. AldineTransaction, 2007.
Charles Hyneman on what the Court actually does and how its way of making policy compares with the alternatives, with the desegregation cases and judicial review as the test material; a 2007 AldineTransaction reprint, 308 pages, of a book first published by Atherton Press in 1963. Not read.
Ides, Allan. “The Jurisprudence of Justice Byron White.” Yale Law Journal 103 (1993): 419.
The standard jurisprudential assessment, by White's own former clerk, published while the justice still sat — the case that White's resistance to both ideological camps was itself a coherent judicial philosophy.
Find a copy →In Memoriam, Honorable Abe Fortas: Proceedings of the Bar and Officers of the Supreme Court of the United States, December 13, 1982. Washington: The Court, 1982.
The Bar's memorial, held the Term after his death and printed by the Court as a 36-page pamphlet with a portrait.
Read it →In Memoriam, Honorable Charles Evans Whittaker: Proceedings of the Bar and Officers of the Supreme Court of the United States, February 19, 1975. Washington: The Court, 1975.
The Bar's memorial, fifteen months after his death, printed by the Court as a 39-page pamphlet with a portrait.
Read it →Iredell, James. Answers to Mr. Mason's Objections to the New Constitution, Recommended by the Late Convention (by 'Marcus'). New Bern, NC: Hodge and Wills, 1788.
Iredell's reply, as 'Marcus', to George Mason's published objections to the Constitution, printed at New Bern by Hodge and Wills for North Carolina's ratification debate of 1788; the one carrier online is Paul Leicester Ford's Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (1888), where Mason's Objections stand at page 327 and Iredell's answer at page 333.
Read it →Irons, Peter, and Stephanie Guitton, eds. May It Please the Court: The Most Significant Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court Since 1955. New York: The New Press, 1993.
Twenty-three landmark arguments transcribed from the Court's own tapes, six cassettes in the box, published over the National Archives restrictions the editor had signed and to the Court's public fury — the same year all the argument recordings were opened at last.
Read it →Irons, Peter. A People's History of the Supreme Court: The Men and Women Whose Cases and Decisions Have Shaped Our Constitution. New York: Viking, 1999.
The Zinn-school history of the Court told from the litigants up — the enslaved, the schoolchildren, and the objectors whose names are on the cases — by the scholar-litigator who helped reopen Korematsu.
Read it →Irons, Peter. Brennan vs. Rehnquist: The Battle for the Constitution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Irons's 1994 pairing of Brennan and Rehnquist as the poles of the modern Court, catalogued under both men, constitutional law and 'political questions and judicial power'; Knopf, xiv, 380 pages.
Read it →Irons, Peter. The Courage of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court. New York: Free Press, 1988.
Sixteen litigants tell how their cases reached the Court, with Irons's framing; Free Press, 1988, with a Penguin paperback in 1990. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Isgur, Sarah. Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today's Supreme Court. New York: Crown, 2026.
Sarah Isgur, editor of SCOTUSblog and co-host of Advisory Opinions, on the Court of 2026 as a 3-3-3 bench of institutionalists and reformers rather than a 6-3 partisan one; Crown, April 2026, 416 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Jackson, Ketanji Brown. Lovely One: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2024.
Jackson's bestselling memoir, and the natural introduction to the newest justice — its title the English meaning of her West African name, Ketanji Onyika.
Jackson, Percival E. Dissent in the Supreme Court: A Chronology. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.
A chronology of dissent on the Court from the beginning to 1969, xi and 583 pages from the University of Oklahoma Press. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Jackson, Robert H. Dispassionate Justice: A Synthesis of the Judicial Opinions of Robert H. Jackson. Edited by Glendon Schubert. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
Schubert's arrangement of the opinions, fifteen years after the death: the record says it 'includes official opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court written by Justice Jackson, as well as his concurring and dissenting opinions,' synthesised by subject rather than printed by term.
Read it →Jackson, Robert H. That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Edited by John Q. Barrett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Jackson's unpublished memoir of Franklin Roosevelt, written in the 1950s and edited a half-century later by the Jackson scholar John Q. Barrett — an intimate, shrewd portrait of the president Jackson served as Attorney General and admired as a friend.
Read it →Jackson, Robert H. The Case Against the Nazi War Criminals. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946.
The prosecutor's case, 258 pages from Knopf in 1946, published while the tribunal was still sitting and a year before The Nürnberg Case gathered the whole.
Read it →Jackson, Robert H. The Nürnberg Case. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.
Jackson's own account of the case he built against the Nazi leadership, including the opening statement that many regard as the greatest courtroom address of the century — 'the wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.'
Read it →Jackson, Robert H. The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy: A Study of a Crisis in American Power Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941.
Jackson's own account of the court-packing crisis, written as Attorney General on the eve of his appointment — a New Dealer's brief against the old Court's war on Roosevelt's program, and a classic of political constitutionalism in its own right.
Read it →Jackson, Robert H. The Supreme Court in the American System of Government. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.
Jackson's valedictory — the Godkin Lectures, published just after his sudden death — a lucid, modest reflection on the Court's real and proper power by the finest writer ever to sit on it.
Read it →Jacobi, Tonja, and Dylan Schweers. Justice, Interrupted. Virginia Law Review 103, no. 7 (2017): 1379–1487.
The study that established it: female justices speak less often and use fewer words than their male colleagues, and are nonetheless interrupted at a significantly higher rate — by the other justices, and by the advocates, against the Court’s own rules.
Read it →Jacobi, Tonja, and Matthew Sag. The New Oral Argument. Notre Dame Law Review 94, no. 3 (2019): 1161–1253.
Fifty-five years of transcripts, and the finding that the justices stopped asking questions and started making arguments — more words, longer speeches, more interruptions, more comments aimed at the side they will vote against — with the break dated to 1995 and tied to the polarization of the politics outside the Court.
Read it →Jacobs, Clyde E. Justice Frankfurter and Civil Liberties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.
A political scientist's study of the civil-liberties record, published the year before Frankfurter left the bench as volume 12 of the University of California's publications in political science: viii, 265 pages with a portrait.
Read it →Jacobsen, John Gregory. Jackson's Judges: Six Appointments Which Shaped a Nation. Covenant Books, 2024.
A recent group study of all six Jackson appointees, and the one work the Federal Judicial Center's bibliography lists for Baldwin.
Find a copy →Jacobstein, J. Myron, and Roy M. Mersky. The Rejected: Sketches of the 26 Men Nominated for the Supreme Court but Not Confirmed by the Senate. Milpitas, CA: Toucan Valley Publications, 1993.
Sketches of the twenty-six men nominated to the Supreme Court and not confirmed by the Senate, 188 illustrated pages from a small California press in 1993; HathiTrust holds it search-only and no free copy was found. Not read.
James, Rawn, Jr. Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
The intertwined story of Charles Hamilton Houston and his student Thurgood Marshall — the mentor who built the legal theory and the protégé who carried it to victory over Plessy.
Read it →James, Rawn, Jr. The Truman Court: Law and the Limits of Loyalty. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2021.
Rawn James, a Washington lawyer, on the Court Truman made with four appointments between 1945 and 1949, and on a bench whose loyalty-era decisions the publisher says appeared to support the administration that produced it; Missouri, June 2021, 320 pages. Not read.
Jay, John. An Address to the People of the State of New-York, on the Subject of the Constitution Agreed upon at Philadelphia, the 17th of September, 1787. New York: S. and J. Loudon, 1788.
Jay's own pamphlet for ratification, written for the New York contest of 1788 in which he would sit as a delegate; the Internet Archive's copy is Paul Leicester Ford's Brooklyn reprint of 1888, and the pamphlet also stands at page 67 of Ford's Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (1888), beside Melancton Smith's answer to it.
Read it →Jay, William. The Life of John Jay: With Selections from His Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (2 vols.). New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833.
The first Jay biography — written by his son, with generous selections from the correspondence, and the source every later life builds on.
Read it →Jefferson, Renee Knake, and Hannah Brenner Johnson. Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
The nine women who reached a president's shortlist and were passed over, beginning with the Ohio judge Florence Allen in the 1930s, recovered by Renee Knake Jefferson and Hannah Brenner Johnson with a foreword by Melissa Murray; NYU Press, May 2020, 304 pages. Not read.
Jeffries, John C., Jr. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.: A Biography. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994.
One of the great judicial biographies, and the indispensable book on Powell.
Read it →Jenkins, John A. The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. New York: PublicAffairs, 2012.
The fullest single-volume life, and the natural starting point — but a critical one, and readers should know it.
Read it →Jensen, Merrill, ed. The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Vol. III: Connecticut (the “Landholder” essays). Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1978.
Ellsworth's thirteen pseudonymous "Landholder" essays, published in the Connecticut Courant and American Mercury in 1787–88, were among the most effective ratification advocacy in New England — and the best sustained record of his constitutional thinking in his own voice.
Find a copy →John Marshall Harlan Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1810–1971.
The first Harlan's papers at the Library: 20,400 items in 49 containers, 21.2 linear feet and 34 reels of microfilm, bulk 1861 to 1911.
Read it →John Marshall Harlan Papers — Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Library, 1884–1972.
The papers themselves, at Princeton: 685 boxes spanning 1884 to 1972, mostly 1936 to 1971, which the finding aid describes as 'legal materials, correspondence, writings, and personal papers that document his career as an attorney and a judge, especially the period when he was a Supreme Court Justice,' the bulk being 'opinions and other legal documents from all of the cases heard before the Supreme Court while Harlan was a member,' with correspondence files across the whole career.
Find a copy →“John Marshall Harlan.” New York Law Forum 1 (1955): 1.
The lead item of the first number the New York Law School's journal ever published, March 1955, while the Senate was still deciding: an unsigned sketch of the nominee from the Harlan lineage through the years at Root, Clark, Buckner and Ballantine, ending on Eisenhower's praise of him.
Read it →John McLean Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1816-1866.
Twenty-seven containers and eighteen reels of microfilm: 4,000 items, 10.6 linear feet, 1816 to 1866 with the bulk from 1829 to 1860, which is to say the postmaster generalship and the thirty-two years on the Court together.
Read it →Johnson, Herbert A. The Chief Justiceship of John Marshall, 1801–1835. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
The accessible one-volume institutional history of the Marshall Court, by a coeditor of the Marshall Papers — how the Court actually worked, case by case and term by term.
Find a copy →Johnson, Herbert A., Charles T. Cullen, and Charles F. Hobson, eds. The Papers of John Marshall. 12 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974–2006.
The scholarly foundation: correspondence, legal papers, and judicial materials, splendidly annotated — with Hobson's introductions amounting to a biography in themselves.
Find a copy →Johnson, Herbert Alan. John Marshall in the Supreme Court. Clark, NJ: Talbot Publishing, 2019.
Herbert Johnson's late collection of essays on Marshall's leadership from 1801 to 1835, three of them previously unpublished: a historiographical survey, a statistical analysis of the Court's opinions under Marshall, and studies of William Cushing, William Johnson and Bushrod Washington.
Johnson, Kevin A., and Craig R. Smith. Fear and the First Amendment: Controversial Cases of the Roberts Court. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2024.
Ten Roberts Court speech cases, Morse v. Frederick to Kennedy v. Bremerton, read for the fear each opinion answers, by two communication scholars at Cal State Long Beach; Alabama, June 2024, 256 pages. Not read.
Johnson, Timothy R. Oral Arguments and Decision Making on the United States Supreme Court. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.
The book-length statement of the information-gathering account: justices use argument to learn the legal and policy options in a case, the preferences of the other institutions that will have to live with the result, and the institutional rules that constrain what they can do about it.
Find a copy →Johnson, William. Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene (2 vols.). Charleston, SC: A. E. Miller, 1822.
The only sitting justice ever to publish a major two-volume biography — his life of the Revolutionary general, researched and written between circuits.
Find a copy →Johnston, Henry P., ed. The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay (4 vols.). New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1890–93.
For the reader who wants Jay in his own words tonight.
Read it →Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
The standard account of the Mende captives' revolt and the case it became: the Hartford circuit proceedings, John Quincy Adams's argument, and the 1841 opinion holding the captives free.
Find a copy →Jones, Michael E. "Five New Hampshire U.S. Supreme Court Justices: Woodbury, Clifford, Chase, Stone and Souter." New Hampshire Bar Journal 33, no. 4 (1992): 6–12.
The home-state genre — New Hampshire's five justices surveyed together, from Woodbury to the newly seated David Souter.
Jost, Kenneth. The New York Times on the Supreme Court, 1857-2008. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2008.
News articles, editorials and letters from the New York Times on the Court from 1857 to 2008, arranged by theme under freedom of ideas, political participation, equal protection, and crime and punishment, with case details and Kenneth Jost's commentary; CQ Press, October 2008, 480 pages, in the TimesReference series. Not read.
Find a copy →Jost, Kenneth. The Supreme Court A to Z. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2012.
More than three hundred and fifty cross-referenced entries on the Court, with appendices listing every nomination from 1789 to 2011, a seat chart, the text of the Constitution and a bibliography, by Kenneth Jost, CQ Press's Supreme Court editor; CQ Press, Washington, March 2012, 668 pages, a fifth edition adding Kagan, Sotomayor and an entry on the media. Not read.
Find a copy →“Justice Harry A. Blackmun, 1908-1999.” Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1999).
The Society's memorial number: Justice Breyer's remarks at the memorial service at Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church, a career sketch from Harvard through the Mayo Clinic and the Eighth Circuit, and the clerks' and colleagues' recollections.
Read it →“Justice John Blair and the Letter of the Law.” Colonial Williamsburg Journal. 2006.
Find a copy →"Justice Wm. Burnham Woods." The Washington Law Reporter 15, no. 23 (1887): 357–59.
It is an unsigned obituary in the issue of 8 June 1887, three and a half weeks after Woods died, reprinted from the Ohio Law Journal and credited at the foot.
Read it →Kagan, Elena. “Confirmation Messes, Old and New.” University of Chicago Law Review 62 (1995): 919.
The essay that called confirmation hearings a 'vapid and hollow charade' — quoted back at her, endlessly, at her own vapid and hollow charade in 2010.
Read it →Kagan, Elena. “Presidential Administration.” Harvard Law Review 114 (2001): 2245.
Kagan's most influential scholarship — the canonical modern account of presidential control over the administrative state, drawn from her Clinton White House years.
Read it →Kahn, Ronald, and Ken I. Kersch, eds. The Supreme Court and American Political Development. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
Case studies putting the Court inside the American political development literature, on the Reconstruction amendments and race, affirmative action after Bakke, the persistence of Roe, the Court's relations with the New Deal and Great Society coalitions and Native American citizenship, edited by Ronald Kahn of Oberlin and Ken I. Kersch of Princeton; Kansas, May 2006, 504 pages. Not read.
Kairys, David. With Liberty and Justice for Some: A Critique of the Conservative Supreme Court. New York: New Press, 1993.
Thirty-one decisions on speech, voting, religion, equal protection, and privacy, read by a veteran civil rights lawyer as evidence that the liberal rulings of the 1960s were the aberration.
Read it →Kalman, Laura. Abe Fortas: A Biography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
The definitive biography, exhaustively researched and judicious.
Read it →Kalman, Laura. FDR's Gambit: The Court Packing Fight and the Rise of Legal Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Laura Kalman's revisionist account of the 1937 court-packing fight, arguing that the plan came much closer to passing than the standard story allows and that the Court changed direction in response; Oxford, September 2022, 440 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Kalman, Laura. The Long Reach of the Sixties: LBJ, Nixon, and the Making of the Contemporary Supreme Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Find a copy →Kaminski, John P., and Jennifer Lawton. “Duty and Justice at ‘Every Man’s Door’: The Grand Jury Charges of Chief Justice John Jay, 1790–1794.” Journal of Supreme Court History 31, no. 3 (2006): 235–251.
The fullest study of the charges that were the early federal judiciary's real public voice — Jay's courtroom civic sermons, reprinted in newspapers up and down the seaboard.
Kang, John M. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Fixations of Manliness. Routledge, 2018.
John Kang of St. Thomas reads the free-speech dissents in Abrams and Gitlow against an idiosyncratic conception of manliness rooted in physical courage and formed by the Civil War service, and argues that the famous opinions are philosophical commentary on what democracy demands rather than the sceptical marketplace they are usually taken for.
Find a copy →Kaplan, David A. The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court in the Age of Trump. New York: Crown, 2018.
David Kaplan's critical, behind-the-scenes narrative of the modern Court — the argument that the justices, Roberts foremost, have grasped more power than a democracy should grant them, and should be more modest than they are.
Karfunkel, Thomas, and Thomas W. Ryley. The Jewish Seat: Anti-Semitism and the Appointment of Jews to the Supreme Court. Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1978.
Anti-Semitism and the appointment of Jews to the Court, 178 pages from Exposition Press in 1978 with a six-page bibliography. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Karlan, Pamela S., Diane P. Wood, Karen Nelson Moore and others. “The Jurisprudence of Justice Harry A. Blackmun.” Dickinson Law Review 97, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 421–626.
The final major reckoning written while Blackmun was still on the bench, and free in full.
Find a copy →Kastellec, Jonathan P., and Robin A. Taboni. A Database of the Shadow Docket. Journal of Law and Courts 14, no. 1 (2026): 220–237.
The first systematic database of the Court's non-merits work: Kastellec and Taboni parsed the Journal of the Supreme Court for the 1993 through 2024 terms into individual orders, sorting more than 265,000 actions across some 220,000 dockets into fifty-nine categories from cert denials to GVRs. Open access, with the data at shadowdocketdata.com and Harvard Dataverse; abstract and citation read, not the article.
Find a copy →Katcher, Leo. Earl Warren: A Political Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
The other 1967 life, by a journalist who had covered California politics: the prosecutor, the attorney general, the governor and the vice-presidential candidate before the Court, at 520 pages.
Read it →Katzenbach, Nicholas deB. “Byron White's Appointment to the Supreme Court.” University of Colorado Law Review 58 (1987): 429.
How the seat was filled in the spring of 1962, by the man who was in the Justice Department when it happened: Whittaker's retirement, the other names, and Robert Kennedy's objection that, whatever their distinction, none was really close to the President.
Read it →Kaufman, Andrew L. Cardozo. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
The definitive biography, thirty years in the making, by a Harvard law professor who once clerked at the Court.
Find a copy →Keck, Thomas M. The Most Activist Supreme Court in History: The Road to Modern Judicial Conservatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
The road to modern judicial conservatism, and the case that it produced the most activist Court in the Court's history; University of Chicago Press, 2004, 378 pages. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Kelby, William. “The Duel between Brockholst Livingston and James Jones.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 7 (1883): 486 (Notes and Queries).
The fullest account of the duel that this chapter could reach, from the librarian of the New-York Historical Society in 1883, out of the newspapers of May 1798: the Argus of May 8 and its 'Master Jemmy Jones, another boy, and not quite sixty'; Jones at the printer's, then on the Battery; Hoboken on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 9; both fired at once, and Jones 'received a ball in his groin, which opened a main artery, and he died in a few minutes'; the burial at St. Paul's the next evening.
Find a copy →Kellogg, Frederic R. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Frederic Kellogg's reading of Holmes as a legal theorist rather than a stylist: the argument is that Holmes's restraint on the bench followed from a theory of law as something that emerges from social experience and community practice, so that a judge who legislates from the bench mistakes what law is.
Kennedy, Anthony M. Life, Law & Liberty: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025.
Kennedy's own account, published in October 2025 — Sacramento, the 1987 nomination after Bork, and unusually candid reflections on Casey, Obergefell, and the swing-seat decades.
Find a copy →Kennedy, Anthony M. “Anthony M. Kennedy: Academy of Achievement Interview, June 3, 2005.” Academy of Achievement (2005).
Video and transcript, free.
Find a copy →Kennedy, Edward M., Richard B. Collins, Burke Marshall, Kate Stith, and Paul Tagliabue. “Tributes to Byron R. White.” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003): 973.
Five tributes in the March 2003 issue: Kennedy's 'The Unforgettable Byron White' (973), Collins's 'Western Justice' (975), Burke Marshall's 'Byron White, Lawyer' (987), Kate Stith's 'Justice White and the Law' (993), and NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's 'A Tribute to Byron White' (999).
Read it →Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage (the Lamar chapter). 1956.
The reason most readers have heard of Lamar at all.
Read it →Kens, Paul. Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1997.
The modern biography and the natural first read.
Find a copy →Kens, Paul. The Supreme Court under Morrison R. Waite, 1874–1888. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
Paul Kens on the Court of 1874 to 1888, the civil rights cases out of the Colfax massacre and the campaigns over women's rights, Mormon polygamy and Chinese immigration, and the railroad, corporate regulation and land cases beside them, with the argument that this was no transitional Court but one whose majority saw themselves as guardians of a pre-war constitutional tradition; South Carolina, July 2010, 240 pages, in the Chief Justiceships series. Not read.
Find a copy →Kent, Charles A., ed. Memoir of Henry Billings Brown, Late Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Duffield, 1915.
Brown left an autobiographical sketch, and after his death his Detroit friend Charles Kent published it with connecting material — and this slim volume remains, more than a century on, the closest thing to a biography Brown has.
Read it →Kiel, Daniel. The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023.
Paired study of Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas and the 1991 succession that joined them, tracing two opposed constitutional routes toward the same end of fuller Black citizenship.
Kierner, Cynthia A. Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675–1790. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.
The scholarly study of the Livingston dynasty of New York, in which Brockholst Livingston is a minor figure.
Find a copy →Killenbeck, Mark R. "William Johnson, the Dog That Did Not Bark?" Vanderbilt Law Review 62, no. 2 (2009): 407–445.
The essential modern re-examination — from the same 2009 Vanderbilt symposium that reassessed Samuel Chase and Bushrod Washington.
Read it →King, Gilbert. Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America. New York: Harper, 2012.
The Pulitzer Prize winner — King's gripping reconstruction of the 1949 Groveland case in Florida, where Marshall and the LDF defended four young Black men falsely accused of rape amid lynch mobs, a murderous sheriff, and Klan terror.
Read it →King, Willard L. Lincoln's Manager, David Davis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
The one full biography, and still the standard life six decades on.
Find a copy →King, Willard L. Melville Weston Fuller: Chief Justice of the United States, 1888–1910. New York: Macmillan, 1950.
King recovers the improbable rise: the Augusta, Maine, boy and Bowdoin graduate who became a Chicago railroad and commercial lawyer and active Democrat, never held federal office, and was Grover Cleveland's out-of-nowhere pick for the center chair after Waite died.
Read it →Klarman, Michael J. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
The Court and racial equality from Plessy through the Progressive Era and the wars to Brown and the civil rights movement, concluding that Brown mattered most for mobilizing southern white opposition and encouraging direct-action protest; Oxford, 2004, 655 pages. Not read.
Read it →Klinkhamer, Marie Carolyn. Edward Douglass White: Chief Justice of the United States. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1943.
The standard scholarly biography — Marie Klinkhamer's life of the Confederate soldier and Louisiana sugar planter who became the ninth Chief Justice and gave American law the antitrust 'rule of reason.'
Knowles, Helen J. The Tie Goes to Freedom: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on Liberty. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
The best study of Kennedy's constitutional thought — Helen Knowles's argument that a coherent conception of liberty, not mere difference-splitting, runs through his opinions on speech, dignity, and gay rights.
Read it →Knowles, Helen J., and Steven B. Lichtman, eds. Judging Free Speech: First Amendment Jurisprudence of US Supreme Court Justices. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Nine essays, one justice each, on First Amendment jurisprudence: Holmes, Sutherland, Black, Harlan II, Brennan, Stewart, Kennedy, Thomas and Breyer, edited by Helen Knowles and Steven Lichtman as accessible overviews of each justice's approach; Palgrave Macmillan, October 2015, 288 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Knox, John. The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox: A Year in the Life of a Supreme Court Clerk in FDR’s Washington. Edited by Dennis J. Hutchinson and David J. Garrow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
The most vivid inside account of any justice's chambers ever published — McReynolds's 1936–37 clerk recorded his employer's cruelty, his bigotry, and the strange loneliness of the household, against the backdrop of the Court-packing fight.
Find a copy →Kobylka, Joseph F., Tony Mauro, Daniel Farber and others. “Reflections on Judging: A Discussion Following the Release of the Blackmun Papers.” Missouri Law Review 70, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 965–1308.
A symposium on what the Blackmun papers revealed, held as they opened.
Read it →Koh, Harold Hongju, Nan D. Hunter and others. “Justice Blackmun and Judicial Biography: A Conversation With Linda Greenhouse.” Brooklyn Law Review 72, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 1–236.
The reason to come is Harold Koh's “Unveiling Justice Blackmun” — Koh conducted the roughly five-hundred-page oral history over the eighteen months after the retirement, so this is the man who asked the questions writing about the man who answered them.
Find a copy →Konefsky, Samuel J. Chief Justice Stone and the Supreme Court. New York: Macmillan, 1945.
The only other book-length Stone study besides Mason's great biography — a contemporary analysis of his chief justiceship written while Stone still presided, valuable precisely for its before-the-verdict perspective on the wartime Court.
Konefsky, Samuel J. John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton: Architects of the American Constitution. New York: Macmillan, 1964.
The classic paired study tracing how Hamilton's constitutional vision — implied powers, national supremacy, the sanctity of contract — became law through Marshall's opinions.
Konefsky, Samuel J. The Legacy of Holmes and Brandeis: A Study in the Influence of Ideas. New York: Macmillan, 1956.
Konefsky on Holmes and Brandeis as a single inheritance rather than two careers, Macmillan, 1956, 316 pages; reprinted by Collier in 1961 and Da Capo in 1974.
Read it →Konvitz, Milton R. Expanding Liberties: Freedom's Gains in Postwar America. New York: Viking Press, 1966.
Friedman and Israel's last item, which 'contains many references to Clark': Konvitz's survey of the postwar expansion of civil liberties, published the year before Clark left the bench, so that his Mapp and Schempp and Heart of Atlanta are in it as news.
Read it →Kozel, Randy J. Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Randy Kozel of Notre Dame identifies the structural problem in stare decisis, that judges who disagree about interpretive method will find their views on a precedent's durability tracking their views on whether it was right, and proposes a theory to survive changes of personnel; Cambridge, June 2017, 180 pages. Not read.
Kroninger, Robert H. Sarah and the Senator. Berkeley, CA: Howell-North Books, 1964.
The book-length account of the maddest story in Supreme Court history — the Sharon divorce scandal, Sarah Althea Hill, and David Terry's vendetta against Field, which ended with a U.S. marshal shooting Terry dead at a railroad lunchroom in 1889 and the Court blessing it in In re Neagle.
Kuhner, Timothy K. Capitalism v. Democracy: Money in Politics and the Free Market Constitution. Stanford Law Books, 2014.
Timothy Kuhner argues that treating money as speech has produced a free-market democracy that corrupts capitalism as well as democracy, since politically powerful firms escape competition, and that only an amendment can restore the boundary; Stanford Law Books, June 2014, 376 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Kurland, Philip B. “Review of Civil Liberties and the Vinson Court by C. Herman Pritchett.” University of Chicago Law Review 22 (1954).
Philip Kurland's 1954 review of Pritchett's Civil Liberties and the Vinson Court, the low estimate of Vinson's leadership ('If Vinson was a "leader" at all it was of Mr. Justice Clark and Mr. Justice Minton'), with footnotes naming the kinder appraisals by Allen and Frank.
Read it →Kurland, Philip B. “The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren.” Yale Law Journal 87 (1977): 225.
Kurland's review of the posthumous memoirs opens 'This is a dull book on an important subject,' notes that the internment regret is there and the Brown dissension is not, and ends with the other verdict on where Warren belongs: 'not Marshall and Hughes, but rather his immediate predecessor and immediate successor: Fred M. Vinson and Warren E. Burger.'
Read it →Kurland, Philip B., ed. Felix Frankfurter on the Supreme Court: Extrajudicial Essays on the Court and the Constitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Kurland's collection of Frankfurter's non-judicial writing on the Court and Constitution — the single best volume of the justice in his own analytical voice.
Read it →Kutler, Stanley I. Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Judicial power in the politics of Reconstruction, 178 pages from the University of Chicago Press in 1968. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Labbé, Ronald M. & Jonathan Lurie. The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003.
The standard history of the 1873 decision that first construed the Fourteenth Amendment and narrowed it for a century.
Find a copy →Lamar, Clarinda Pendleton. The Life of Joseph Rucker Lamar, 1857–1916. 1926.
The one full life, written by the justice's widow ten years after his death.
Read it →Lamb, Brian, Susan Swain, and Mark Farkas, eds. The Supreme Court: A C-SPAN Book Featuring the Justices in Their Own Words. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010.
Interviews with all nine sitting justices plus retired Justice O'Connor, gathered for a C-SPAN documentary and rounded out by court reporters, advocates, and the Clerk of the Court.
Lamb, Charles M., and Stephen C. Halpern, eds. The Burger Court: Political and Judicial Profiles. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
A profile of each justice of the Burger Court and of the Court's politics, 513 illustrated pages from the University of Illinois Press in 1991, five years after Burger left.
Lane, Charles. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. New York: Henry Holt, 2008.
The dark side of the same Court, told as narrative history.
Find a copy →Lane, Frederick S. The Court and the Cross: The Religious Right's Crusade to Reshape the Supreme Court. Beacon Press, 2008.
Frederick S. Lane on three decades of organised effort to shape federal judicial appointments and what it did to the decisions on school prayer, abortion and public funding of religious bodies, by a legal journalist and attorney; Beacon Press, 2008, 263 pages. Not read.
Lash, Joseph P., ed. From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975.
Frankfurter's own diaries, with a long biographical introduction by Joseph Lash — gossipy, self-justifying, and indispensable, the justice's unguarded running commentary on colleagues, presidents, and cases.
Read it →Lasser, William. The Limits of Judicial Power: The Supreme Court in American Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
The Supreme Court in American politics and the limits of what it can do, 354 pages from the University of North Carolina Press in 1988 with a twenty-four-page bibliography. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Lawrence, Albert. “Biased Justice: James C. McReynolds of the Supreme Court of the United States.” Journal of Supreme Court History 30, no. 3 (2005): 244–270.
The standard scholarly treatment of what makes McReynolds unique in the Court's history: an antisemitism so open he refused to speak to Brandeis, sit for photographs with him, or attend Cardozo's memorial.
Find a copy →Lawrence, Alexander A. James Moore Wayne: Southern Unionist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943.
The standard biography for eighty years, by a Savannah lawyer-historian with access to the family materials and the city's memory.
Read it →Lazarus, Edward. Closed Chambers: The First Eyewitness Account of the Epic Struggles Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Times Books, 1998.
A Blackmun clerk's account of October Term 1988 — capital punishment, race, abortion — attacked on publication for breaching the confidentiality of chambers.
Read it →Lazarus, Richard J. The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020.
Massachusetts v. EPA from Joe Mendelson's petition to Stevens's five-vote opinion, told by Richard Lazarus of Harvard, who argues that accident, infighting and luck decided the case as much as law; Belknap, March 2020, 368 pages, and winner of the 2021 Julia Ward Howe Prize. Not read.
Find a copy →Leach, Richard H. "Rediscovery of Samuel Nelson." New York History 34, no. 1 (1953): 64–71.
The one modern scholarly attempt to pull Nelson out of the footnotes, and its title concedes the situation: a half-century judge obscured precisely because he generated no scandals and joined no crusades.
Leach, Richard H.; Frank J. Williams & William D. Bader. "A Model for a Successful Legal Career" (ABA Journal, 1955) & "Maverick Lawyer and Independent Jurist" (Roger Williams U. L. Rev., 2012).
That the bar keeps reaching for Curtis as its exemplar is itself the finding.
Ledbetter, William H., Jr. “Mr. Justice Harlan: Due Process and Civil Liberties.” South Carolina Law Review 20 (1968): 389.
The doctrinal study Friedman and Israel point to, by an assistant professor at South Carolina: Harlan's Fourteenth Amendment due process work traced to Cardozo and Frankfurter and read through the state criminal procedure, free speech and privacy cases as restraint rather than preference, with the cost stated plainly: 'His treatment of civil liberty cases within the due process clause no doubt causes him in many instances to decide a case quite differently from his personal tastes.'
Find a copy →Lee, Evan Tsen. Judicial Restraint in America: How the Ageless Wisdom of the Federal Courts Was Invented. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Evan Tsen Lee's history of where the restraint doctrines came from, standing and abstention among them, from Marshall to Scalia, with the claim that they cannot be understood apart from the cultural and intellectual forces of their times, including shifting values about property, racial equality and the environment; Oxford, 2011, 232 pages. Not read.
Lee, Mike. Saving Nine: The Fight Against the Left's Audacious Plan to Pack the Supreme Court and Destroy American Liberty. Nashville, TN: Center Street, 2022.
Senator Mike Lee of Utah against Court expansion, arguing that the idea has moved from the fringe into mainstream Democratic politics and would turn the judiciary into a partisan instrument; Center Street, 2022, 240 pages. Not read.
Leiter, Richard A., and Roy M. Mersky, eds. Landmark Supreme Court Cases: The Most Influential Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Facts On File, 2012.
More than six hundred decisions arranged chronologically within chapters by legal issue, each entry giving the citation, the year, the key issue, the background, the arguments, the majority and dissenting opinions, the aftermath, the significance, related cases and further reading, edited by Richard A. Leiter and Roy M. Mersky; Facts On File, 2012, three volumes, a second edition of the 2004 set by Gary R. Hartman, Mersky and Cindy L. Tate. Not read.
Find a copy →Leonard, Charles A. A Search for a Judicial Philosophy: Mr. Justice Roberts and the Constitutional Revolution of 1937. Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1971.
The closest thing to a full study of Roberts, built around the question that shadows him: did he switch in 1937 from principle or from fear of Roosevelt's court-packing plan?
Read it →Lessig, Lawrence. Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Lawrence Lessig's six-hundred-page account of constitutional interpretation as translation, fidelity to meaning across changing contexts, and of the second fidelity, to the judicial role, which he argues wins when the two conflict; Oxford, May 2019, in the Inalienable Rights series. Not read.
Find a copy →Lester, Wilbur R. “Fred M. Vinson in the Executive Branch.” Northwestern University Law Review 49 (1954): 36.
The war years and the Treasury, by the man who clerked for Judge Vinson on the Court of Appeals for two years and was his assistant through the three in the executive branch; it begins on that arithmetic: 'FRED M. VINSON was in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government for three years.'
Find a copy →Lettieri, Ronald John. Connecticut's Young Man of the Revolution: Oliver Ellsworth. Hartford: American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut, 1978.
Leuchtenburg, William E. The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
The best account of the 1937 crisis — the collision between Roosevelt's New Deal and the Four Horsemen, the court-packing plan, and the shift of doctrine that made the plan unnecessary.
Find a copy →Levine, Lee, and Stephen Wermiel. The Progeny: Justice William J. Brennan's Fight to Preserve the Legacy of New York Times v. Sullivan. American Bar Association, 2014.
Brennan's fifty-year defence of New York Times v. Sullivan and the line of defamation and speech cases descending from it, written from previously unpublished Brennan papers and from Stephen Wermiel's own interviews with the justice, with Lee Levine; American Bar Association, 2014, 473 pages. Not read.
Levitan, David M. “Mahlon Pitney, Labor Judge.” Virginia Law Review 40, no. 6 (1954): 733–770.
The classic examination of the record Pitney is remembered for — the full run of his labor opinions, from Coppage to his quiet votes sustaining workmen's compensation.
Levitan, David M. “The Jurisprudence of Mr. Justice Clarke.” Miami Law Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1952).
The one dedicated study of Clarke's six years of opinions — the Wilson appointee whose liberal dissents alongside Brandeis and Holmes hinted at the justice he might have become had he stayed.
Levy, Robert A., and William Mellor. The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom. New York: Sentinel, 2008.
Twelve decisions arraigned as the ones that expanded government and eroded liberty, from Helvering v. Davis and Wickard v. Filburn to Kelo v. New London, by Robert Levy, then chairman of the Cato Institute, and William Mellor, president of the Institute for Justice; Sentinel, 2008, 302 pages, an advocate's brief rather than a study. Not read.
Lewis F. Powell Jr. Archives. Lexington, Virginia: Washington and Lee University School of Law.
The papers, at his alma mater's law school: the Powell Papers proper, the law library's other manuscript collections, and the school's own archives, with the memorandum and a growing digitised selection online.
Read it →Lewis, Anthony. Gideon’s Trumpet. New York: Random House, 1964.
The classic account of Gideon v. Wainwright: Clarence Earl Gideon's petition from prison, Abe Fortas's court-appointed argument, and the 1963 holding that a poor defendant must be given a lawyer.
Read it →Lewis, Anthony. Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment. New York: Random House, 1991.
New York Times v. Sullivan told whole — the 1960 advertisement, the Montgomery commissioner's $500,000 libel suit, the 1964 decision — set inside a broader history of American free speech.
Lewis, Meredith Kolsky. “Justice William Johnson and the History of Supreme Court Dissent.” Georgetown Law Journal 83 (1995): 2069.
Read it →Lewis, Thomas Tandy, ed. The U.S. Supreme Court. Salem Press, 2016.
Salem Press's three-volume student reference, edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis: every justice, articles on areas of law and constitutional clauses, and hundreds of decisions, with the 2016 edition adding gun rights, campaign finance, same-sex marriage, class actions and unions; 1,093 pages, a second edition of the Magill's Choice set of 2007. Not read.
Find a copy →Lewis, Walker. Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
The other full biography — warmer, faster, written for general readers by a Maryland lawyer who spent years in the family materials.
Find a copy →Library of Congress, Division of Bibliography (Herman H. B. Meyer, chief bibliographer). List of Works Relating to the Supreme Court of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909.
The Library of Congress's own bibliography of the Court, compiled under Herman H. B. Meyer in 1909: books, periodical articles, reports, digests of reports, and biographical material on the chief justices and justices, 124 pages from the Government Printing Office. Free and in the public domain.
Read it →Library of Congress, Division of Bibliography. Supplementary List of References on Judicial Legislation by Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court Declaring Laws Unconstitutional, Including Power of Congress to Review These Decisions. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1924.
Fifteen pages from the Library of Congress Division of Bibliography in 1924: references on judicial legislation, the decisions striking down statutes, and on the power of Congress to review them, the reading list for the court-curbing debate of the Twenties. A sequel to the Division's 1909 list on this shelf. Public domain; no scan reached. Not read.
Library of Congress. Hugo LaFayette Black Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2011.
130,000 items in 513 containers, spanning 1883 to 1976 and covering both careers: correspondence, notebooks, case files, speeches, and the Senate papers as well as the Court ones.
Read it →Lichtman, Robert M. The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression: One Hundred Decisions. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Robert Lichtman's account of every Communist-related decision of the McCarthy era, a hundred of them, tracing the turn from the Vinson Court's deference to the Warren Court's resistance, the retreat under Frankfurter's influence and the resumption after Goldberg replaced him in 1962; Illinois, July 2012, 285 pages, by a lawyer who practised for nearly thirty years in Washington. Not read.
Find a copy →Lima, Lazaro. Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019.
Lazaro Lima reads the appointment rather than the life: his argument is that Sotomayor's confirmation was taken as a sign of Latino inclusion at exactly the moment when the civil rights protections that made her career possible were being dismantled, and that treating her as a possibility model substitutes symbol for enfranchisement.
Find a copy →Lindquist, Stefanie A., and Frank B. Cross. Measuring Judicial Activism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Stefanie Lindquist and Frank Cross's attempt to make judicial activism measurable rather than partisan, scoring the use of judicial review against federal and state law and executive action, the expansion of access to the courts and the willingness to overturn precedent, and ranking recent justices on each; Oxford, April 2009, 192 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Litman, Leah. Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes. New York: One Signal/Atria, 2025.
Irreverent polemic from a Michigan law professor and Strict Scrutiny co-host, arguing that the six-justice majority runs on conservative grievance rather than the originalism it professes.
Find a copy →Lively, Donald E., and D. Scott Broyles. Contemporary Supreme Court Cases: Landmark Decisions Since Roe v. Wade. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2016.
More than a hundred landmark decisions since Roe, with commentary and excerpts from the opinions, arranged under separation of powers, economic regulation, equality and individual rights, by Donald Lively of Toledo and D. Scott Broyles; ABC-CLIO, February 2016, two volumes and 792 pages. Not read.
Livingston, Edwin Brockholst. The Livingstons of Livingston Manor. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1910.
The family's own history of itself, by a descendant, which Dunne's bibliography offers as 'A similar profile' to Dangerfield's for the judge: the manor, the line from the first Robert Livingston through the Revolution, with a chapter on the family's part in the war and a portrait of Judge Brockholst Livingston at page 248.
Read it →Lofgren, Charles A. The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Lofgren's monograph is the standard account of Plessy as law — where 'separate but equal' came from (antebellum Massachusetts, of all places), how the doctrine traveled through railroad cases and state courts, and why Brown's opinion struck almost no one in 1896 as a thunderbolt.
Read it →Long, Michael G., ed. Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall. New York: Amistad, 2011.
Hundreds of Marshall's letters from the 1930s and 1940s — the years of dangerous fieldwork building the cases that became Brown.
Read it →Lovelace, Ryan. Search and Destroy: Inside the Campaign against Brett Kavanaugh. 2019.
A legal reporter's case that the 2018 fight was an organized and funded campaign — Demand Justice and its allies — coupled with a challenge to the accusers' credibility and some seventy pages of notes.
Lowe, Jennifer M., ed. The Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court Revisited: Brandeis to Fortas. Washington, DC: Supreme Court Historical Society, 1994.
The Supreme Court Historical Society's 142 illustrated pages of 1994 on the Jewish justices from Brandeis to Fortas, with a preface by Breyer and an introduction by Ginsburg. No copy found online. Not read.
Lurie, Jonathan. The Chase Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
The ABC-CLIO handbook for the Chase years, Santa Barbara, 2004: the justices, the major decisions and the legacy, in the reference series whose Taney volume is also on these pages.
Lurie, Jonathan. The Chief Justiceship of William Howard Taft, 1921–1930. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2019.
Lurie's focused study of what Taft actually built from the center chair: the Judiciary Act of 1925 and the certiorari revolution, the campaign for the Supreme Court building, the lobbying of presidents about appointments.
Find a copy →Lurie, Jonathan. The Supreme Court and Military Justice. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2013.
Jonathan Lurie on military justice at the Court in four parts, the Civil War era, the Second World War, 1956 to 1987 and the years after 11 September 2001, each an analytical introduction followed by briefs, rulings and contemporary reporting; CQ Press, August 2013, 256 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Lurie, Jonathan. William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
The modern scholarly reassessment, strong on the through-line of Taft's career — a judicial temperament miscast in the presidency and finally at home on the bench.
Read it →Lurie, Jonathan. “Mr. Justice Bradley: A Reassessment.” Seton Hall Law Review 16 (1986): 343–376.
The standard modern scholarly assessment of Bradley — the Legal Tender appointment, the 1877 Electoral Commission vote, and the great Fourteenth Amendment opinions, weighed by a leading Court historian.
Read it →Lurie, Jonathan. “Stanley Matthews: A Case Portrait of Gilded Age High Court Jurisprudence.” Journal of Supreme Court History 33, no. 2 (2008).
The best single treatment of what Matthews actually did with his eight years — above all Yick Wo and Hurtado, the pair of 1880s opinions that still anchor equal-protection and due-process law.
Lynch, David. The Role of Circuit Courts in the Formation of United States Law in the Early Republic: Following Supreme Court Justices Washington, Livingston, Story and Thompson. Portland, OR: Hart, 2018.
The rare modern monograph on how justices actually made law on circuit, where the vast bulk of their judging happened — with Washington, Livingston, Story and Thompson as its principal subjects.
Find a copy →Maclin, Tracey. The Supreme Court and the Fourth Amendment's Exclusionary Rule. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Tracey Maclin of Boston University on the exclusionary rule across the Vinson, Warren, Burger and Rehnquist Courts, written from the retired justices' papers and treating the rule as a political mechanism that expands and contracts with the times; Oxford, 2013, 416 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Magarian, Gregory P. Managed Speech: The Roberts Court's First Amendment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Gregory Magarian of Washington University reads more than forty First Amendment decisions from 2005 to 2016 as a doctrine of managed speech that empowers established institutions and marginalises outsiders, and proposes dynamic diversity instead; Oxford, April 2017, 292 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Magliocca, Gerard N. Washington's Heir: The Life of Justice Bushrod Washington. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
From William & Mary and the apprenticeship under Justice James Wilson (whose seat he would eventually fill) through thirty-one years on the Court, the inheritance of Mount Vernon and George Washington's papers, the founding presidency of the American Colonization Society, and the 1821 sale of enslaved people from Mount Vernon that scandalized even his contemporaries.
Find a copy →Magnet, Myron. Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution. New York: Encounter Books, 2019.
The conservative brief for Thomas as the Court's most important originalist — Magnet's admiring argument that Thomas has spent decades trying to restore a 'lost Constitution' of limited government and natural rights.
Magrath, C. Peter. Morrison R. Waite: The Triumph of Character. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
The standard biography, and still the only full one — the natural place to begin.
Read it →Malphurs, Ryan A. Rhetoric and Discourse in Supreme Court Oral Arguments: Sensemaking in Judicial Decisions. Routledge, 2013.
Ryan Malphurs challenges the consensus that oral argument rarely moves votes, analysing the exchanges in Morse v. Frederick, Kennedy v. Louisiana and Heller and offering sensemaking in place of the rational-choice account; Routledge, 2013, 224 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Maltese, John Anthony. The Selling of Supreme Court Nominees. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Traces the public campaign for and against nominees to its origin, dating the first “Borking” to John Rutledge's rejection in 1795 and arguing that what changed in the modern era is the range of players and the political techniques they use. Winner of APSA's Pritchett Award for the best book on law and courts.
Maltz, Earl M. "Biography is Destiny: The Case of Justice Peter V. Daniel." Brooklyn Law Review 72, no. 1 (2006): 199–210.
The limiting case of how far ideology can substitute for judging, and a caution about what a life appointment preserves.
Find a copy →Maltz, Earl M. Dred Scott and the Politics of Slavery. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
The Landmark Law Cases volume on Dred Scott: 182 pages, Kansas, 2007, the short case history of the decision that carries Taney's name further than anything else he wrote.
Maltz, Earl M. Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009.
Eight antebellum slavery cases, one to a chapter, from The Antelope and The Amistad through Groves v. Slaughter, Prigg, Strader and Dred Scott to Ableman v. Booth and Kentucky v. Dennison.
Maltz, Earl M. The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, 1969-1986. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.
The volume the South Carolina chief-justiceship series gave Burger, published in 2000: xvi and 307 pages on the Court he led, from federalism and economic regulation to freedom of speech.
Maltz, Earl M. The Coming of the Nixon Court: The 1972 Term and the Transformation of Constitutional Law. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016.
Earl Maltz of Rutgers on October Term 1972, the first with all four Nixon appointees sitting, which produced Roe v. Wade along with decisions on school desegregation, criminal procedure, obscenity, the rights of the poor, sex discrimination and aid to parochial schools; Kansas, August 2016, 262 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Maltz, Earl M.; R. Owen Williams. "The Unlikely Hero of Dred Scott" (Cardozo L. Rev., 1996), "The Last Angry Man" & "Benjamin Curtis: Top of the List" (Chicago-Kent L. Rev. 82, 2007).
Manaster, Kenneth A. Illinois Justice: The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
The making of the justice — Kenneth Manaster's account of the 1969 Illinois judicial-corruption scandal that Stevens, as special counsel, helped expose, lifting an obscure Chicago antitrust lawyer toward the bench.
Read it →Mann, Ronald J. Bankruptcy and the U.S. Supreme Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Ronald Mann of Columbia on four decades of bankruptcy cases, concentrating on the closely divided ones where the statute gave no answer, and reading them from the justices' private papers and from the citations that migrate out of briefs into opinions; Cambridge, April 2017, 286 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Mannino, Edward F. Reinterpreting the Constitution: How the Supreme Court Changes the Law. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023.
Some two hundred cases in which the Court remade constitutional doctrine, surveyed by the lawyer and historian Edward Mannino; Lexington, May 2023, 302 pages. Not read.
Mannino, Edward F. Shaping America: The Supreme Court and American Society. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009.
About a hundred and fifty landmark decisions from the early republic to District of Columbia v. Heller, arranged chronologically and thematically with particular attention to business and religion, by Edward F. Mannino, a trial lawyer and legal historian; University of South Carolina Press, 2009, 321 pages. Not read.
Marcus, Maeva, et al., eds. The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789–1800. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985–2007.
Eight volumes in nine: the essential documentary source for the Court's first decade — appointment records, correspondence, circuit materials, press accounts, and the Court's own rough and final minutes.
Find a copy →Markstein, Charlotte. “United States Supreme Court Decision: United States v. Cruikshank (1876).” Evalyn Clark Memorial Travel Fellowship report, Vassar College (2019).
Seven hundred words by a Vassar undergraduate reporting a research trip, and the only published account by anyone who has actually opened the thing.
Find a copy →Marshall, John. A History of the Colonies Planted by the English on the Continent of North America, from Their Settlement to the Commencement of That War Which Terminated in Their Independence. Philadelphia: A. Small, 1824.
The first volume of the Life of Washington, cut loose: the record says it was 'originally published as an introduction to the author's life of George Washington', and here it stands alone, 486 pages from A. Small of Philadelphia in 1824, Marshall's one work of history that is not about Washington at all.
Read it →Marshall, John. An Autobiographical Sketch. Edited by John Stokes Adams. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1937.
Marshall telling his own story to his closest colleague — modest, wry, and revealing in what it lingers on (Valley Forge, his father) and what it hurries past.
Read it →Marshall, John. The Events of My Life: An Autobiographical Sketch by John Marshall. Edited by Lee C. Bollinger and John C. Dann. Ann Arbor, MI; Washington, DC: Clements Library, University of Michigan; Supreme Court Historical Society, 2001.
Marshall on himself, in thirty pages: the autobiographical sketch, edited by Lee C. Bollinger and John C. Dann with an introduction by Chief Justice Rehnquist, and published in 2001 by the Clements Library at Michigan with the Supreme Court Historical Society.
Marshall, John. The Life of George Washington, Commander in Chief of the American Forces (5 vols.). Philadelphia: C. P. Wayne, 1804–07.
The Chief Justice's five volumes on Washington, written in his first years on the Court from the papers Bushrod Washington held at Mount Vernon and published by C. P. Wayne of Philadelphia between 1804 and 1807.
Read it →Marshall, Thomas R. American Public Opinion and the Modern Supreme Court, 1930-2020: A Representative Institution. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022.
Thomas Marshall of Texas at Arlington matches more than five hundred decisions since the mid-1930s to the national polls taken around them and finds about two-thirds of them agreeing with the majority or plurality; Lexington, April 2022, 204 pages. Not read.
Marshall, Thomas R. Public Opinion and the Rehnquist Court. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008.
Thomas Marshall matching more than two thousand nationwide polls from the Rehnquist years against the decisions, and finding that most align with majority opinion, especially where the public is well informed and the Solicitor General agrees, and that unpopular decisions last less long; State University of New York Press, February 2008, 282 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Marshall, Thurgood. The Constitution's Bicentennial: 'The Government They Devised Was Defective from the Start'. 1987.
Marshall's most famous speech, delivered as the nation prepared to celebrate the Constitution's two-hundredth anniversary — and a bracing refusal to celebrate uncritically.
Martin, Andrew D., and Kevin M. Quinn. Dynamic Ideal Point Estimation. Political Analysis 10, no. 2 (2002): 134–153.
The paper that made judicial ideology a moving quantity: a Bayesian item-response model fitted to every vote from 1953 to 1999, yielding one ideal point per justice per term and showing that many justices’ preferences do not stay still — the measure behind every claim of drift on this site.
Read it →Martin, Fenton S., and Robert U. Goehlert. The U.S. Supreme Court: A Bibliography. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1990.
The standard bibliography of the Court, and the yardstick this site audits its own shelves against: one continuous numbered sequence running past 7,000 entries, arranged justice by justice, its latest entries dated January 1988. Never revised, which means hundreds of the works shelved here postdate it and cannot be in it — a gap the master bibliography marks work by work.
Read it →Masnov, James M. Rights Reign Supreme: An Intellectual History of Judicial Review and the Supreme Court. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2023.
An intellectual history of judicial review as the guardian of rights, from the founding to now, by the independent historian James Masnov; McFarland, 2023, 252 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Mason, Alpheus Thomas. Brandeis: A Free Man's Life. New York: Viking, 1946.
The authorized biography, written with access to Brandeis and his papers, and for sixty years the standard.
Read it →Mason, Alpheus Thomas. Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law. New York: Viking Press, 1956.
The definitive biography, and one of the great judicial lives.
Read it →Mason, Alpheus Thomas. The Supreme Court from Taft to Burger. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.
Fifty years of the Court read as one institutional story, 337 pages from Louisiana State University Press in 1979; the third edition, revised and enlarged, of a book first published in 1958 as The Supreme Court from Taft to Warren and revised again in 1968, the retitling marking how far past its own ending the story had run. No copy found online. Not read.
Mason, Alpheus Thomas. William Howard Taft: Chief Justice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965.
The best book on Taft as Chief Justice, by the great judicial biographer who also wrote the lives of Brandeis and Stone.
Find a copy →Massaro, John. Supremely Political: The Role of Ideology and Presidential Management in Unsuccessful Supreme Court Nominations. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.
The nominations that failed, and why: 272 pages from SUNY Press in 1990 in its series on the presidency, on the parts ideology and presidential management played in the defeats. No copy found online. Not read.
Mathewson, Joe. The Supreme Court and the Press: The Indispensable Conflict. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Joe Mathewson of Medill on two centuries of a mutually dependent and often dysfunctional relationship between the Court and the press, from the Court's long neglect of press freedom before the 1960s to the argument that restricted access and the camera ban have limited public understanding; Northwestern University Press, January 2011, 501 pages. Not read.
Maveety, Nancy. Glass and Gavel: The U.S. Supreme Court and Alcohol. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
Nancy Maveety on the justices' own drinking and the Court's liquor cases together, from taverns as meeting places to bootleggers and sobriety checkpoints; Rowman & Littlefield, 384 pages, dated 2019 by the Library and December 2018 by the publisher. Not read.
Maveety, Nancy. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: Strategist on the Supreme Court. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996.
The political scientist's study of O'Connor's method — the deliberate, accommodationist, case-by-case strategy that made her the Court's median vote and, for years, its most powerful member.
Read it →Maveety, Nancy. Queen's Court: Judicial Power in the Rehnquist Era. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
The argument in the title: that O'Connor's influence on the Rehnquist Court may have exceeded the Chief Justice's own.
May, Daniel L. A Bibliography on the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Hempstead, NY: Hofstra University School of Law, 1985.
Fifty-one pages from the Hofstra law school in 1985, the year before Burger retired: a bibliography of writing on the Court under him, compiled while the Court was still his.
Mayer, Jane, and Jill Abramson. Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
The most thorough investigative account of the 1991 confirmation and the Anita Hill hearings, by two distinguished journalists.
Read it →Mayes, Edward. Lucius Q.C. Lamar: His Life, Times, and Speeches, 1825–1893. Nashville: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1896.
The monumental contemporary life-and-letters, by Lamar's son-in-law — nearly nine hundred pages of biography and speeches published three years after his death.
Read it →Mazie, Steven V. American Justice 2015: The Dramatic Tenth Term of the Roberts Court. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Steven Mazie of the Economist on October Term 2014, the term of King v. Burwell and Obergefell; Penn Press, November 2015, 180 pages, the second of the annual six. Not read.
Find a copy →McClain, Charles J. In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
The essential context for Yick Wo.
Find a copy →McClellan, James. Joseph Story and the American Constitution: A Study in Political and Legal Thought. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.
The standard study of Story as a thinker: his Christian natural-law foundations, his Burkean conservatism, his nationalism, and the tensions among all three.
Find a copy →McCloskey, Robert G. The American Supreme Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.
In print and revised since 1960, the short interpretive survey built on the claim that the Court's strength lies in never straying far from public sentiment — later editions by Sanford Levinson.
Read it →McCloskey, Robert G. The Modern Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.
McCloskey's later book on the Court, 376 pages from Harvard in 1972, catalogued under the Court's history, and a separate work from his 1960 survey rather than an edition of it. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
McClure, Fred. “Confirming David Souter.” Miller Center, University of Virginia, Presidential Oral History Program (2001).
How the Bush White House ran the 1990 confirmation, from its director of legislative affairs, in the Miller Center's George H. W. Bush oral history (interview of September 20, 2001): the low profile, the Senate, and the strategy.
Find a copy →McCowan, George S., Jr. “Chief Justice John Rutledge and the Jay Treaty.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 52 (1961): 10.
The dedicated study of the episode that defines Rutledge — his furious July 1795 speech against the Jay Treaty, delivered weeks after accepting the recess appointment as Chief Justice, which handed the Senate its reason to reject him that December.
McCune, Wesley. The Nine Young Men. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947.
The answering book on the Roosevelt Court, 299 illustrated pages from Harper & Brothers in 1947, eleven years and one constitutional revolution after Pearson and Allen counted nine old ones. Reprinted by Greenwood in 1969; search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
McCurdy, Charles W. “Blatchford, Samuel (1820–1893).” In Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, edited by Leonard W. Levy et al. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
Short, signed, and by a serious historian of Gilded Age law — the only piece of modern analysis of Blatchford that exists outside Arnold Paul's chapter, and the one it cites.
Find a copy →McCurdy, Charles W. “Justice Field and the Jurisprudence of Government-Business Relations: Some Parameters of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism, 1863–1897.” Journal of American History 61, no. 4 (1975): 970–1005.
The most influential Field article ever written — McCurdy's demolition of the caricature of Field as a corporate tool, recasting him as a principled Jacksonian drawing a line between public power and private right.
McDevitt, Matthew. Joseph McKenna: Associate Justice of the United States. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1946.
The only full biography, from a Catholic University of America dissertation — and frankly protective of its subject, but the sole sustained account of a genuinely unlikely justice.
Read it →McFeatters, Ann Carey. Sandra Day O'Connor: Justice in the Balance. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.
A concise, readable life for the general reader, tracing the ranch-girl-to-swing-vote arc with a journalist's eye.
Read it →McGinty, Brian. Lincoln and the Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
The best single book on the wartime Court: Taney's dying resistance, habeas corpus, and the Prize Cases, where one changed vote would have declared the blockade unconstitutional.
Find a copy →McGinty, Brian. The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Taney's strange last act: a Maryland secessionist lieutenant arrested in May 1861, a dying Chief Justice riding to Baltimore to order the army to produce him, and a president who declined to obey.
Find a copy →McGuigan, Patrick B., and Dawn M. Weyrich. Ninth Justice: The Fight for Bork. Washington, DC: Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, 1990.
The fight for Bork told by its own side: 326 pages from the Free Congress Foundation in 1990, with the Judicial Notice interview with Bork and an analysis of the press coverage by R. H. Bork Jr.; the anti-Bork account is on this shelf beside it. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
McGuire, Kevin T. The Supreme Court Bar: Legal Elites in the Washington Community. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
Who actually argues before the Court: 254 pages from the University Press of Virginia in 1993 on the specialist bar in Washington, catalogued under lawyers' interviews as well as judicial process, in the Constitutionalism and Democracy series. No copy found online. Not read.
McKenna, Marian C. Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War: The Court-Packing Crisis of 1937. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.
The court-packing fight at full length, 612 illustrated pages from Fordham in 2002, in fifteen chapters that run from the fifty-fourth attorney general through Black Monday, the landslide and the Senate hearings to the aftermath. No copy found online. Not read.
McKeown, M. Margaret. Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2022.
A federal judge's study of the conservationist justice — Douglas's decades of activism for wilderness, his famous hikes and protest marches, and the tangled ethics of a sitting justice who lobbied and litigated for the causes he loved.
McKoski, Raymond J. David Davis, Abraham Lincoln's Favorite Judge. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2025.
Only the second full biography of Davis ever written — and the first since 1960.
Find a copy →McLean, Joseph E. William Rufus Day: Supreme Court Justice from Ohio. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946.
The only book-length life, from a Johns Hopkins study — a slim, careful account of a genuinely modest man.
McLellan, Donn. “In Memoriam: Chief Justice Warren E. Burger: Biographical Profile.” William Mitchell Law Review 22 (1996): 1.
The life from his own law school's review, the year after his death: Saint Paul, the night classes at St. Paul College of Law, the Minnesota Republican politics, the Justice Department, the D.C. Circuit, and the Chief Justiceship, with the administrative reforms he cared most about.
Find a copy →McMahon, Joel. "Our Good and Faithful Servant": James Moore Wayne and Georgia Unionism. 2017.
Roots Wayne's wartime loyalty in a specifically Georgian unionism running back through the nullification fight, and follows it to the war's end: Wayne never wavered, and never went home.
McMahon, Kevin J. A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide between the Justices and the People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Kevin McMahon's account of the democracy gap between the justices and the public, traced to changes in who is nominated, how, and from what pool, Roosevelt to Trump; Chicago, April 2024, 384 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →McMahon, Kevin J. Nixon's Court: His Challenge to Judicial Liberalism and Its Political Consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Kevin McMahon's case that Nixon's judicial strategy substantially worked, legally and politically: that he put law and order and school desegregation ahead of abortion and school prayer, calibrated the appointments to hold white southerners and northern white ethnics without losing moderate Republicans, and used attacks on the Court to reach the Silent Majority and split the New Deal coalition.
Find a copy →McRee, Griffith J., ed. Life and Correspondence of James Iredell. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1857–58.
A major nineteenth-century life built around extensive correspondence — family, political, and judicial letters that made it indispensable to later biographers and still reward consultation.
Read it →Meador, Daniel J. “Lamar to the Court: Last Step to National Reunion.” Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook 1986: 27–47.
The standard article-length account of the nomination fight itself — the first ex-Confederate named to the Court, confirmed 32–28 after a battle that previewed the modern ideological confirmation war.
Meltsner, Michael. Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment. New York: Random House, 1973.
The campaign that produced Furman, told the year after it by one of its architects: 338 pages from Random House in 1973, and the Death Penalty Information Center's description of its author as one of the key architects at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund behind the challenge. Paperback from Morrow in 1974, reissued by Quid Pro in 2011. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Melville Weston Fuller Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1794–1949.
Five thousand items, 'primarily of letters exchanged between Fuller and family members, as well as letters received from Bowdoin classmates and other friends and professional associates,' from his enrollment at Bowdoin in 1849 to his death, with correspondence from Day, Moody, Holmes, Harlan and Gray among the colleagues.
Read it →Memorandum on the death of Mr. Justice Livingston. United States Reports 21 (8 Wheaton), February Term 1823.
The Court's own notice, a page of Wheaton's front matter, and the earliest character of the man as a judge: the soldier who 'had served his country with distinguished military reputation during the war of the revolution,' the advocate 'fruitful in invention, and possessing a brilliant and persuasive elocution,' the judge whose 'genius and taste had directed his principal attention to the maritime and commercial law,' and the close, 'an upright, enlightened, and humane judge, a patriotic citizen, and a bright ornament of the profession,' with a Latin sentence counting him among the orators.
Read it →Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
Not a biography but the great group portrait of the world that made Holmes — the Pulitzer-winning history of American pragmatism, tracing Holmes alongside William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey from the trauma of the Civil War to a new conception of ideas as instruments rather than truths.
Read it →Mendelson, Wallace. Justices Black and Frankfurter: Conflict in the Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
The classic statement of the mid-century divide, by a political scientist sympathetic to Frankfurter — the Black–Frankfurter feud over incorporation, restraint, and the meaning of the First Amendment framed as the defining argument of the modern Court.
Read it →Mendenhall, Allen. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon: Aesthetic Dissent and the Common Law. Bucknell University Press, 2017.
Allen Mendenhall reads the dissents as literature and finds in them two qualities he takes from Emerson, superfluity and the poetics of transition, which made them memorable enough for later judges to reopen settled precedent with.
Mennel, Robert M., and Christine L. Compston, eds. Holmes and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1912–1934. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996.
The scholarly edition of the letters between the young professor and his idol — the relationship that shaped Frankfurter's whole conception of judging.
Merida, Kevin, and Michael A. Fletcher. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
The richest biography — two Washington Post journalists on the anger, isolation, and racial complexity of a man who rose through institutions he distrusts.
Read it →Messer, Robert L. The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
The scholarly study of Byrnes at State — Robert Messer on how the South Carolinian's diplomacy helped turn the wartime alliance into the Cold War.
Read it →Michelman, Frank I. Brennan and Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
The leading book-length treatment of Brennan's constitutional and democratic theory — the Harvard theorist Frank Michelman on Brennan's vision of a 'living' Constitution read anew by each generation, and its answer to the charge of judicial overreach.
Read it →Miller, Arthur S., and Jeffrey H. Bowman. Death by Installments: The Ordeal of Willie Francis. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.
The case of the man Louisiana electrocuted twice: Willie Francis, whose first execution failed and whose second the Court allowed in Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, 329 U.S. 459 (1947). A 179-page narrative from Greenwood in 1988 in the Contributions in Legal Studies series, catalogued under the Saint Martinville murder trial, capital punishment and judicial review. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Miller, Charles A. The Supreme Court and the Uses of History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969.
How the justices use the past, 234 pages from the Belknap Press in 1969 on the Court as a reader and writer of history. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Miller, Loren. The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966.
The Court and Black Americans from the Civil War amendments to the 1960s, published by Pantheon in 1966 and written by a lawyer who had argued in front of it: Loren Miller was counsel for the petitioners in Shelley v. Kraemer with Thurgood Marshall. The Library of Congress gives the book as 461 pages and the American Political Science Review's review as 433; no copy was found online. Not read.
Miller, Richard Lawrence. Whittaker: Struggles of a Supreme Court Justice. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
The other full Whittaker biography — published three years before Smith's Failing Justice, by a Kansas City historian whose research papers now sit in the Eisenhower Presidential Library.
Find a copy →Miller, Samuel Freeman. Lectures on the Constitution of the United States. New York: Banks and Brothers, 1891.
The posthumous book: Miller's lectures at the Columbian University law school in Washington, gathered the year after his death by J. C. Bancroft Davis, the Court's Reporter, who signed the preface and supplied the notes; xxi and 765 pages from Banks and Brothers, 1891.
Read it →Miller, Samuel Freeman. The Constitution and the Supreme Court of the United States of America. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1889.
Two addresses of the centennial year, seventy pages from Appleton in 1889: the memorial oration at Philadelphia on 17 September 1887, a hundred years to the day from the signing, and an address to the University of Michigan's law alumni that June, by the senior Associate Justice on the Court and the Constitution as he had spent twenty-five years reading it.
Read it →Millhiser, Ian. Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted. Nation Books, 2015.
Ian Millhiser on the Reconstruction amendments gutted and then turned into shields for wealthy interests, with the Warren years as an interlude, told through the people the decisions fell on; Nation Books, March 2015, 368 pages. Not read.
Millhiser, Ian. The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court Is Reshaping America. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2021.
Ian Millhiser of Vox on what he calls the agenda of a Republican Court, across voting rights, campaign finance, the administrative state, church and state and corporate liability; Columbia Global Reports, March 2021, 143 pages in the series' short-report form. Not read.
Find a copy →Modern judicial assessments: Herbert A. Johnson, Vanderbilt Law Review 62 (2009); David A. Faber, West Virginia Law Review 102 (2000).
Two law-review assessments of Bushrod as a working judge — Johnson's in the same 2009 Vanderbilt symposium that reassessed Samuel Chase, Faber's on his role in early American legal development.
Read it →Moke, Paul. Earl Warren and the Struggle for Justice. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
A political scientist's life of Warren, 363 pages from Lexington in 2015, which credits the progressive turn on race, criminal justice and marital privacy and the innovations in how the Court explained itself, and is critical of the California career and of the Warren Commission, where the publisher says he showed lapses of judgment and deference to authority on national-security questions.
Monaghan, Frank. John Jay: Defender of Liberty Against Kings & Peoples. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935.
For decades this was the major full biography of Jay.
Find a copy →Moreno, Paul D. How the Court Became Supreme: The Origins of American Juristocracy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022.
Paul Moreno of Hillsdale on how a minor institution grew into the most powerful judiciary in the world and how the constitutional checks on it fell into disuse; LSU Press, September 2022, 358 pages. Not read.
Morgan, Donald G. Justice William Johnson, The First Dissenter: The Career and Constitutional Philosophy of a Jeffersonian Judge. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1954.
Morgan reconstructs Johnson's Charleston world, his rise from a blacksmith's household to Jefferson's first Supreme Court appointment at thirty-two, and — the book's lasting contribution — his lonely campaign to keep independent judgment alive inside Marshall's single-opinion Court.
Find a copy →Morris, Jeffrey B. “A Lawyer's Lawyer, A Judge's Judge: Justice Potter Stewart and the Fourth Amendment.” University of Cincinnati Law Review 51 (1982): 509.
The leading study of the doctrine Stewart owned — the author of Katz and its 'reasonable expectation of privacy,' assessed by a leading judicial historian.
Morris, Jeffrey B. “Chief Justice Edward Douglass White and President Taft's Court.” Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook 1982: 27–45.
The standard short assessment of the White chief justiceship's strangest feature: the man who appointed him, William Howard Taft, spent the next decade waiting for the seat — and got it when White died.
Morris, Richard B. John Jay, the Nation, and the Court. Boston: Boston University Press, 1967.
A shorter, more academic treatment organized around interpretive essays — especially useful for understanding Jay's nationalism, his conception of government, and his view of the judiciary, though older and less biographically complete than Stahr.
Find a copy →Morris, Richard B. The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
The Bancroft Prize–winning history of the peace negotiations that ended the Revolution — with Jay's defiant decision to negotiate directly with Britain at its center.
Morris, Richard B., ed. The Papers of John Jay (2 vols.). New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 1980.
A deeply scholarly and documentary-rich portrait of Jay's years through the Revolution and peace negotiations.
Find a copy →Morrison, Toni, ed. Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.
The landmark scholarly response to the 1991 hearings — essays edited by Toni Morrison on race, gender, and power in the Hill–Thomas confrontation, among the most-cited academic works on the episode.
Read it →“Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron TWO: Loss of PT 109 and Subsequent Rescue of Survivors (August 1943).” Naval History and Heritage Command (1943).
The Navy's own file on the sinking of Kennedy's boat, reproduced by the Naval History and Heritage Command: the action reports and, as an enclosure, the intelligence memorandum compiled from the survivors and signed by the flotilla's two intelligence officers, the first of them Lieutenant (jg) B. R. White.
Find a copy →Mourtada-Sabbah, Nada, and Bruce E. Cain, eds. The Political Question Doctrine and the Supreme Court of the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.
Essays on the political question doctrine, its shifting boundaries and its contemporary application including extraterritorial questions, edited by Nada Mourtada-Sabbah of the American University of Sharjah and Bruce Cain of Berkeley; Lexington Books, January 2007, 273 pages. Not read.
Murley, John A., and Sean D. Sutton. The Supreme Court Against the Criminal Jury: Social Science and the Palladium of Liberty. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014.
John Murley and Sean Sutton on the four decisions of the 1970s that allowed six-person juries and non-unanimous verdicts, Williams, Ballew, Apodaca and Johnson, and on the social-science evidence the Court leaned on to reach them; Lexington, 2014, 127 pages. Not read.
Murphy, Bruce Allen. Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice. New York: William Morrow, 1988.
The fuller account of the scandal, by the biographer of William O. Douglas.
Find a copy →Murphy, Bruce Allen. Scalia: A Court of One. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
The other major biography, and the skeptical one — Bruce Allen Murphy argues that Scalia's combativeness and refusal to compromise cost him the majorities his talents deserved, leaving him a brilliant 'court of one.'
Read it →Murphy, Bruce Allen. Scalia: A Court of One. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
The long biography, 644 pages from Simon & Schuster in June 2014, by Bruce Allen Murphy of Lafayette College, who had written lives of Frankfurter, Fortas and Douglas before it: the Cleveland practice, the Ford administration, the D.C. Circuit from 1982 and the appointment of 1986, and an argument that the refusal to compromise cost Scalia the conservative majority he might have led.
Find a copy →Murphy, Bruce Allen. The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
The book that caused a scandal — Murphy's documentation of the two justices' extensive behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, including Brandeis's secret retainer funding Frankfurter's Washington activity while both sat on the Court.
Read it →Murphy, Bruce Allen. Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 2003.
The major modern biography, and a bracing, warts-and-all account.
Find a copy →Murphy, Charles S. “Charles S. Murphy Oral History Interview, July 15, 1969.” Harry S. Truman Library Oral History Program (1969).
The one first-hand account of Truman's wish that Vinson succeed him as President in 1952.
Find a copy →Murphy, James B. L.Q.C. Lamar: Pragmatic Patriot. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.
The standard modern life, in LSU Press's Southern Biography Series.
Read it →Murphy, Walter F. Congress and the Court: A Case Study in the American Political Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Congress against the Court, a case study in the American political process by its subtitle: 307 pages from Chicago in 1962, catalogued under both institutions. Held by the Internet Archive for in-library use only. Not read.
Murphy, Walter F. Elements of Judicial Strategy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
The book that made the justices strategists: 249 pages from Chicago in 1964 on how a justice with policy ends chooses his means inside an institution of nine. Epstein and Knight, writing the foreword to its 2016 reprint, call it the first strategic account of judicial behavior and count their own The Choices Justices Make among the attempts to test it. Held by the Internet Archive for in-library use only. Not read.
Myers, Gustavus. History of the Supreme Court of the United States. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1912.
A muckraker's history of the Court, 823 pages published in 1912 by Charles H. Kerr of Chicago, a socialist house, and reprinted by Kerr in 1918 and 1925 and by Burt Franklin in 1968. Free and in the public domain at the Internet Archive, which has the 1918 printing.
Read it →Nackenoff, Carol & Julie Novkov. American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2021.
The best book on Gray's most consequential hour.
Find a copy →Neff, Stephen C. Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
The standard legal history of the Civil War, with blockade law and the Prize Cases — Grier's one great opinion, upholding Lincoln's blockade by a 5–4 vote in 1863 — at its center.
Find a copy →Nelson, Adam R. Dartmouth College v. Woodward: Colleges, Corporations, and the Common Good. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2025.
A 2025 study of the Dartmouth College case, Marshall's 1819 opinion that a corporate charter is a contract the state may not impair, by Adam R. Nelson, a historian of education at Wisconsin, in Kansas's Landmark Law Cases & American Society series: New Hampshire's attempt to take over the college, the divergence between the state and federal courts, and the shift the decision marked from commonwealth republicanism to market liberalism.
Nelson, Garrison. Pathways to the US Supreme Court: From the Arena to the Monastery. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Garrison Nelson's quantitative study of the routes to the Court taken by the hundred and twelve justices who served and the twenty-eight other nominees who were defeated, withdrawn or declined; Palgrave Macmillan, December 2013, 340 pages. Not read.
Nelson, Michael. Vaulting Ambition: FDR's Campaign to Pack the Supreme Court. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2023.
The court-packing campaign of 1937 from the President's side, as one part of Roosevelt's plan to remake every branch, by Michael Nelson of Rhodes College; Kansas, February 2023, 144 pages, the first of its Landmark Presidential Decisions series. Not read.
Nemacheck, Christine L. Strategic Selection: Presidential Nomination of Supreme Court Justices from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007.
Christine Nemacheck on how presidents from Hoover to George W. Bush actually chose their nominees, drawn heavily from the presidential papers, with the argument that they maximise ideological preference while minimising uncertainty and are constrained by divided government and by the institutionalised presidency; Virginia, March 2007, 192 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Newman, Roger K. Hugo Black: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
The definitive biography, exhaustively researched and unflinching.
Read it →Newmyer, R. Kent. John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
The leading scholarly judicial biography — law and politics interwoven at full depth, strongest on the great constitutional cases and Marshall's decades-long duel with the Jeffersonians.
Find a copy →Newmyer, R. Kent. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Holds together every Story there was: the Marblehead Republican whom Jefferson distrusted, Marshall's indispensable scholarly partner, the Dane Professor who made Harvard Law School the national seminary of American law, the author of nine series of Commentaries that organized whole fields from scratch, and the judge whose record on slavery ran from denouncing the slave trade as against natural law to writing Prigg v. Pennsylvania.
Find a copy →Newmyer, R. Kent. The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968.
The Marshall and Taney Courts in 184 pages, from Crowell in 1968 and reprinted by Harlan Davidson in 1986 in its American History Series; the short survey by the biographer of Story and of Marshall. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Newmyer, R. Kent. The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr: Law, Politics, and the Character Wars of the New Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Marshall presiding over the most sensational trial of the century — Burr in the dock, Jefferson pressing for a conviction, and the Chief Justice defining constitutional treason so narrowly that the case collapsed.
Find a copy →Newton, Jim. Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.
The best one-volume modern biography, by a Los Angeles Times journalist with a feel for California and for power.
Find a copy →Niven, John, ed. The Salmon P. Chase Papers (5 vols.). Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993.
The scholarly edition — five volumes of Chase's journals and correspondence (1993–1998), edited by his biographer John Niven, and the documentary foundation for all modern work.
Find a copy →Niven, John. Salmon P. Chase: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
The standard scholarly biography, and the fruit of the same historian's years editing the Chase papers.
Find a copy →Noonan, John T., Jr. Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
A Ninth Circuit judge's case against the Rehnquist Court's federalism, 203 pages from California in 2002, catalogued under state governments' privileges and immunities and the liability of government to the states. Noonan had sat on the court of appeals since 1985 and wrote this as a senior judge. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Norgren, Jill. The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.
The standard accessible account of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia — the litigation that produced Thompson's finest hour.
Read it →Novick, Sheldon M. Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.
The first full modern biography, and the first to work through the complete papers — Novick is unsentimental about the coldness and the vanity, and definitive on the Civil War wounds that shaped Holmes's skepticism.
Read it →Novkov, Julie. The Supreme Court and the Presidency: Struggles for Supremacy. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2013.
Julie Novkov's documentary volume on the Court and the presidency, analytical narrative with primary sources, covering executive power, appointments, emergency and war powers, treaties, executive privilege, impeachment and pardons; CQ Press, March 2013, 472 pages, in the Supreme Court's Power in American Politics series. Not read.
Find a copy →Nuxoll, Elizabeth M., et al., eds. The Selected Papers of John Jay (7 vols.). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010–2020.
The essential resource for serious research — the modern annotated edition from the University of Virginia Press, superseding the Morris volumes.
Find a copy →O'Brien, F. William. “Justice Cushing's Undelivered Speech on the Federal Constitution.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 15 (1958): 74.
O'Brien's publication of a speech Cushing drafted for the Massachusetts ratifying convention but never delivered — one of the few windows into the constitutional thinking of a justice who left almost nothing on paper.
O'Connor, John E. William Paterson: Lawyer and Statesman, 1745–1806. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979.
The standard full-length biography and the clear place to begin — from immigrant childhood and New Jersey legal practice through the Revolution, Convention, Senate, governorship, and Court.
Find a copy →O'Connor, Sandra Day, and H. Alan Day. Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. New York: Random House, 2002.
O'Connor's memoir of the Arizona ranch where she grew up, written with her brother — not a book about the Court, but the key to the character who ran it from the center.
Read it →O'Connor, Sandra Day. "Supreme Court Justices from Georgia." Georgia Journal of Southern Legal History 1, no. 2 (1991): 395–406.
A short appreciation of Georgia's justices — Wayne foremost — by a sitting justice, as the FJC's bibliography lists it.
O'Connor, Sandra Day. Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court. New York: Random House, 2013.
The retired justice's affectionate tour of Supreme Court history and lore — the customs, personalities, and turning points of the institution, told with warmth by someone who reshaped it.
Read it →O'Connor, Sandra Day. The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice. New York: Random House, 2003.
O'Connor's reflections on the Court, its history, and the rule of law — accessible essays on the institution she helped steer, written in the middle of her decisive final decade.
Read it →O'Connor, Sandra Day. “Commencement Address, Stanford University, June 13, 2004.” Stanford Report (2004).
The no-job story in her own words, to the class of 2004 at the university that had produced the graduate no firm would hire as a lawyer, and a case for public service built on the people she calls bridge builders.
Find a copy →O'Fallon, James M., ed. Nature's Justice: Writings of William O. Douglas. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2000.
The standard one-volume Douglas reader — judicial opinions and mountain prose side by side, which is the only honest way to present him.
Find a copy →O'Fallon, James M., ed. Nature's Justice: Writings of William O. Douglas. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000.
A reader assembled by James O'Fallon from the books, the political writing and the opinions: the press describes 'selections from his autobiographical and political books, and opinions from landmark cases', chosen to show 'his roots in the Northwest and his lifelong commitment to the environment.'
O'Hara, James. "Reluctant Justice: Thomas Johnson of Maryland." Supreme Court Historical Society Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1991).
The best focused narrative of Johnson's judicial service: his hesitation about accepting, the Southern Circuit assignment, his work in Ware v. Hylton (on circuit) and Georgia v. Brailsford, and the resignation letter describing circuit riding as excessively fatiguing.
Read it →O'Rear, Edward C. "Justice Thomas Todd." Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 38, no. 123 (1940): 112–119.
Obermayer, Herman J. Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait of the Distinguished Chief Justice of the United States. New York: Threshold Editions, 2009.
An affectionate memoir by a friend of Rehnquist's later years — the private man of poker, painting, bad ties, and dry wit behind the austere public Chief.
Read it →O’Brien, F. William, S.J. Justice Reed and the First Amendment: The Religion Clauses. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1958.
The only book-length study of Reed besides Fassett's biography — a Jesuit scholar's analysis of the religion-clause record of the justice who dissented from the school-prayer-adjacent released-time cases with the era's most quoted plea for accommodation.
O’Brien, F. William. “Justice Cushing and the Treaty-Making Power.” Vanderbilt Law Review 10, no. 2 (1957): 351–68; “Justice Cushing and State Sovereignty.” South Carolina Law Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1957): 572–90; “The Pre-Marshall Court and the Role of William Cushing.” Massachusetts Law Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1958): 52–63.
Offutt, T. Scott. "Thomas Johnson and Constitutional Government." Constitutional Review 13 (1929).
Oliver Ellsworth Family Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1762–1907.
Small and candid about its limits: 900 items, of which 'seventeen letters written to Ellsworth and one written by him recount details of his career as a Connecticut lawyer and judge but lack information regarding his public and political life,' the finding aid says; the rest is the estate, the family and 'land interests in Connecticut's Western Reserve.'
Read it →Oliver, William W. “Vinson in Congress.” Northwestern University Law Review 49 (1954): 62.
The fourteen House years, by his last law clerk, who stayed on as senior clerk to Warren; it opens, 'Fred M. Vinson served with high honor in all three branches of our national government.'
Find a copy →Olken, Samuel R. “Justice George Sutherland and Economic Liberty: Constitutional Conservatism and the Problem of Factions.” William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 6, no. 1 (1997).
Read it →O’Brien, David M. Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.
Drawn from the papers of fifty-five justices and six presidents, an account of the Court as a political institution, arguing that rising caseloads have made it more bureaucratic and less collegial.
Read it →Pacelle, Richard L., Jr. The Supreme Court in a Separation of Powers System: The Nation's Balance Wheel. Routledge, 2015.
Richard Pacelle of Tennessee reads the Court as part of an integrated political system rather than an isolated institution, with chapters on its dealings with the presidency, Congress, the bureaucracy, opinion, interest groups and the lower courts; Routledge, 2015, 326 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Pacelle, Richard L., Jr. The Transformation of the Supreme Court's Agenda: From the New Deal to the Reagan Administration. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991.
What the Court chose to hear and how that changed between the New Deal and Reagan, 264 illustrated pages from Westview in 1991 in the Transforming American Politics series, the companion in subject to Perry's Deciding to Decide. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Pacelle, Richard L., Jr., Brett W. Curry, and Bryan W. Marshall. Decision Making by the Modern Supreme Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Richard Pacelle, Brett Curry and Bryan Marshall's attempt to join the legal, attitudinal and strategic models into one account of how the Court decides, tested across decisions from Brown to 2000; Cambridge, June 2011, 278 pages. Not read.
Pack, Michael, and Mark Paoletta. Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2022.
The book of the documentary, published by Regnery on 21 June 2022 and built from dozens of hours of interviews Michael Pack recorded with Thomas and his wife for the 2020 film of the same name, with historical documents and conversations with family and associates around them.
Pack, Michael, and Mark Paoletta. Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2022.
The book edition of the 2020 documentary — thirty-plus hours of Thomas interviews including material the film never used.
Find a copy →Paddock, Lisa. Facts about the Supreme Court of the United States. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1996.
A reference book from a reference publisher: 569 illustrated pages from H. W. Wilson in 1996, with a historical overview by Paul Barrett. No copy found online. Not read.
Painter, Richard W. Conduct Unbecoming: The Ethics Crisis at the Supreme Court and How Legitimacy Can Be Restored. New York: Oxford University Press, 2026.
Richard Painter of Minnesota on the undisclosed gifts and unrecused conflicts of the 2020s and the fixes he proposes, disclosure rules, an ethics lawyer for the Court and a judicial inspector general; Oxford, June 2026, 208 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Palmer, Jan. The Vinson Court Era: The Supreme Court's Conference Votes: Data and Analysis. New York: AMS Press, 1990.
The Vinson Court's conference votes turned into a dataset: 392 pages from AMS in 1990, data and analysis together, in the AMS Studies in Social History series. The votes it counts are the ones taken behind the conference door rather than the ones published, which is a different universe from the decided cases the Supreme Court Database records. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Papenfuse, Edward C., et al., eds. A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635–1789 (2 vols.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979–85.
The strongest reference source for Johnson's long Maryland career: offices, legislative activity, family connections, business interests, and property, reconstructed from unusually rich state records.
Find a copy →Paper, Lewis J. Brandeis: An Intimate Biography. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983.
A readable one-volume life for the general reader, drawing on the family and the papers — warmer and less analytical than Strum or Urofsky, and a good narrative entry point.
Read it →Parker, John J. “Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson: Meeting the Challenge to Law and Order.” American Bar Association Journal 41 (1955): 324.
A tribute in the American Bar Association Journal of April 1955, eighteen months after his death, by John J. Parker.
Parrish, Michael E. Felix Frankfurter and His Times: The Reform Years. New York: Free Press, 1982.
The standard scholarly biography of the making of the man — Vienna, the Lower East Side, Harvard Law, the 'House of Truth,' Sacco and Vanzetti, and the New Deal brain trust.
Read it →Parrish, Michael E. The Hughes Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002.
The Hughes Court in the ABC-CLIO handbook form, 342 illustrated pages from 2002 in four parts: the Court and the period, the justices, major decisions, legacy and impact. No copy found online. Not read.
Parry-Giles, Trevor. The Character of Justice: Rhetoric, Law, and Politics in the Supreme Court Confirmation Process. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2006.
Trevor Parry-Giles on the rhetoric of contested confirmations, studying Brandeis, Hughes, Parker, Marshall, Haynsworth, Carswell and Bork with discussion of Thomas, Ginsburg and Breyer, and arguing that the rancorous public hearing is a twentieth-century invention; Michigan State University Press, March 2006, 267 pages, winner of the 2007 Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism. Not read.
Find a copy →Paschal, Joel Francis. Mr. Justice Sutherland: A Man Against the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951.
The standard biography, and a thoughtful one.
Read it →Paul, Joel Richard. Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.
The most vivid of the recent trade lives, especially on the diplomatic years.
Find a copy →Pearson, Drew, and Robert S. Allen. The Nine Old Men. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1936.
The syndicated columnists' assault on the Hughes Court, 325 pages from Doubleday, Doran in 1936, followed the next year by the 57-page Nine Old Men at the Crossroads; Da Capo reprinted both together in 1974. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Pederson, William D., and Norman W. Provizer, eds. Great Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court: Ratings and Case Studies. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.
Essays from a 1990 conference at Louisiana State University in Shreveport on rating the justices, with case studies; Peter Lang, 1993, xix and 388 pages. Borrow it at the Internet Archive; not read.
Read it →Pedrick, Willard H. “From Congress to the Court of Appeals.” Northwestern University Law Review 49 (1954): 54.
The judge between the House and the war, by a Northwestern law professor, opening on the scene in which Roosevelt offered him the bench: 'After fourteen years in Congress and eight campaigns, Congressman Fred M. Vinson went to the White House in the late Fall of 1937 and was asked by President Roosevelt how he would like to be a Judge in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.'
Find a copy →Pellew, George. John Jay (American Statesmen series). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890.
The standard nineteenth-century life, from the American Statesmen series — the biography that fixed Jay's reputation for two generations before Monaghan.
Read it →Peppers, Todd C. Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of the Supreme Court Law Clerk. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Todd Peppers's study of the law clerk as an institution, from Horace Gray's first clerk in the 1880s onward, built on interviews with fifty-three former clerks, correspondence with ninety more and conversations with justices including Scalia, with a foreword by Robert M. O'Neil; Stanford, 2006, 310 pages. Not read.
Peppers, Todd C. “Birth of an Institution: Horace Gray and the Lost Law Clerks.” Journal of Supreme Court History 32, no. 3 (2007).
Gray's most durable legacy isn't an opinion — he invented the Supreme Court law clerk, hiring Harvard graduates at his own expense starting in 1882.
Peppers, Todd C. “Justice Hugo Black and His Law Clerks: Match-Making and Match Point.” Journal of Supreme Court History 36, no. 1 (2011): 48–61.
Peppers on how Black chose clerks and what he did with them — the most useful short piece written about him since the papers opened, and a corrective to a shelf otherwise dominated by doctrine and biography.
Read it →Peppers, Todd C., and Artemus Ward, eds. In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
The first of Todd Peppers's two collections on the law clerks, edited with Artemus Ward: how clerks are chosen and what they do, from the late nineteenth century on, with personal accounts and the stories of the first Black and the first woman clerk; Virginia, 2012, 445 pages. Not read.
Peppers, Todd C., and Clare Cushman, eds. Of Courtiers and Kings: More Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015.
The second collection, edited by Todd Peppers with Clare Cushman: essays on the justices who had themselves clerked, Breyer, Kagan, Rehnquist, Roberts and Stevens, and on families in which parent and child both clerked; Virginia, December 2015, 448 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Peretti, Terri Jennings. Partisan Supremacy: How the GOP Enlisted Courts to Rig America's Election Rules. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2020.
Terri Jennings Peretti of Santa Clara on voter identification, gerrymandering, campaign finance and Voting Rights Act preclearance as one project, through Crawford, Citizens United, McCutcheon and Shelby County; Kansas, November 2020, 374 pages. Not read.
Perkins, Dexter. Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship. Boston: Little, Brown, 1956.
The compact one-volume life, in Little, Brown's Library of American Biography, by the diplomatic historian Dexter Perkins.
Read it →Perlin, Adam A. "The Impeachment of Samuel Chase: Redefining Judicial Independence." Rutgers Law Review 62, no. 3 (2010).
The most detailed modern legal study of the impeachment: the eight articles, the competing constitutional theories, the Senate votes, and the uncertain meaning of judicial independence in the early republic.
Find a copy →Perry, Barbara A. A “Representative” Supreme Court? The Impact of Race, Religion, and Gender on Appointments. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
A scholarly study of representation in appointments — the Catholic and Jewish "seats," the first Black justice and the first woman — arguing that religion's weight faded as those groups entered the mainstream.
Read it →Perry, Barbara A. The Priestly Tribe: The Supreme Court’s Image in the American Mind. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.
Why the Court's prestige has held while Congress's and the presidency's eroded: the marble palace, the symbols of impartiality, the distance kept from reporters, and what the public actually knows.
Read it →Perry, H. W., Jr. Deciding to Decide: Agenda Setting in the United States Supreme Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
How the Court chooses what to hear: 316 pages from Harvard in 1991 on the certiorari process, built on interviews with justices and clerks, and catalogued under judicial process research and certiorari. HathiTrust holds it search-only and no free copy was found. Not read.
Pertschuk, Michael, and Wendy Schaetzel. The People Rising: The Campaign against the Bork Nomination. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989.
The campaign against Bork told by its own side, 317 pages with plates from Thunder's Mouth Press in 1989; the pro-Bork account is on this shelf beside it. No copy found online. Not read.
Peters, Christopher J., ed. Precedent in the United States Supreme Court. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014.
Eleven essays edited by Christopher Peters of Baltimore on how the Court establishes durable precedent, when and why it overrules itself, and what the normative foundations of stare decisis are; Springer, February 2014, 231 pages, in the Ius Gentium series. Not read.
Find a copy →Pfeffer, Leo. This Honorable Court: A History of the United States Supreme Court. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.
A one-volume history of the Court in 470 pages from Beacon in 1965, catalogued under the Court's history; Pfeffer's other work on these pages of Rutland is on religion and the Court. Reprinted by Octagon in 1978. No copy found online. Not read.
Pfister, Jude M. The Creation of American Law: John Jay, Oliver Ellsworth and the 1790s Supreme Court. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019.
Jude Pfister on the making of an American legal system out of English common law after 1787 and on the Court's first decade under Jay and Ellsworth, with Iredell, Bushrod Washington and James Wilson around them; McFarland, 2019, 280 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Phelps, Timothy M., and Helen Winternitz. Capitol Games: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Story of a Supreme Court Nomination. New York: Hyperion, 1992.
By the Newsday reporter who broke the Hill allegations alongside NPR's Nina Totenberg: the whole nomination from the pick to the vote, including Angela Wright, subpoenaed and never called.
Phillips, Harlan B., ed. Felix Frankfurter Reminisces. New York: Reynal, 1960.
Frankfurter talking — an oral-history memoir drawn from recorded conversations, ranging over his whole life in his own vivid, name-dropping voice.
Read it →Pizzi, William T. The Supreme Court's Role in Mass Incarceration. Routledge, 2021.
William Pizzi of Colorado argues that constitutionalised criminal procedure made trials so complicated and costly that plea bargaining displaced them, and that this did more for mass incarceration than sentencing law; Routledge, 2021, 160 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Pogrebin, Robin, and Kate Kelly. The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019.
An investigative account of Kavanaugh's life and confirmation by two New York Times journalists, sympathetic to the questions raised about his conduct and candor.
Polenberg, Richard. Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech. New York: Viking, 1987.
Abrams v. United States recovered in full: the Russian-Jewish anarchists jailed for leaflets against American intervention in Russia, their lives before and after, and the Holmes dissent that outlived the ruling.
Polenberg, Richard. The World of Benjamin Cardozo: Personal Values and the Judicial Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
A rich study of Cardozo's mind and the New York opinions that made his name, and the best companion to the great common-law cases.
Find a copy →Pollack, Jack Harrison. Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979.
The first full biography after Warren's death, by a journalist who interviewed him — journalistic and admiring, and now superseded by White and Cray, but a useful early portrait.
Read it →Posner, Richard A. Cardozo: A Study in Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Judge Richard Posner's provocative little book asks not whether Cardozo was great but why his reputation is — a cool, faintly deflating analysis of how a judge becomes a legend.
Posner, Richard A., ed. The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
The best single-volume Holmes reader — Judge Richard Posner's selection from the letters, speeches, and opinions, with an incisive introduction that argues for Holmes as a great writer first.
Read it →Post, Charles Gordon, Jr. The Supreme Court and Political Questions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1936.
The political questions doctrine in 145 pages from Johns Hopkins in 1936, number four of the fifty-fourth series of its Studies in Historical and Political Science, catalogued under political questions and judicial power. Reprinted by Da Capo in 1969. No copy found online. Not read.
Post, Robert C. The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921–1930 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 10). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
The long-awaited Holmes Devise history of Taft's Court — three volumes, decades in the making, and now the definitive account of the era.
Find a copy →Post, Robert. “Willis Van Devanter: Chancellor of the Taft Court.” Journal of Supreme Court History 45 (2020).
Post's companion piece explains the paradox: the justice who wrote the fewest opinions may have wielded the most influence, as Taft's indispensable inside counselor on certiorari, legislation, and Court management.
Find a copy →Potter Stewart Papers (MS 1367). New Haven: Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, 1885–1986.
The papers, at Yale: 280.75 linear feet in 679 boxes, bulk 1958-1980, with the Supreme Court case files, the Sixth Circuit materials, correspondence, subject files and writings.
Find a copy →Powe, Lucas A., Jr. The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2020. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2021.
Lucas Powe's argument that the Court is a majoritarian institution which identifies with the governing coalition of its era, in the expanded second edition of 2021, which adds two chapters on the years since 2008; Kansas, 504 pages, first published by Harvard in 2009 as 1789-2008. Not read.
Powe, Lucas A., Jr. The Warren Court and American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.
The indispensable study of the Warren Court, read not as pure law but as national politics — the Court acting as a member of the governing coalition of its era.
Read it →Powell, Lewis F., Jr. "Supreme Court Justices from Virginia." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 84, no. 2 (1976): 131–141.
A sitting justice, himself a Virginian, taking the measure of his state's contributions to the Court.
Find a copy →Powell, Lewis F., Jr. The Powell Memorandum and the Corporate Turn. 1971.
Two months before Nixon nominated him, Powell wrote a confidential memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — 'Attack on the American Free Enterprise System' — urging business to organize, fund, and fight for its interests in politics, the academy, and the courts.
Read it →Powell, Lewis F., Jr. “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” Lewis F. Powell Jr. Archives, Washington and Lee University School of Law (1971).
The memorandum itself, from the Powell Archives at Washington and Lee, in typescript and in the Chamber's printed version: the warning that the free-enterprise system was under attack and the program of organized response, written two months before the nomination and public a year after it.
Read it →Pratt, Robert A. The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia, 1954-89. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
Richmond's schools from Brown to 1989, in the Carter G. Woodson Institute series, with Powell's years as chairman of the city school board read as a middle course between the factions that the author calls tokenism.
Find a copy →Pratt, Walter F., Jr. The Supreme Court under Edward Douglass White, 1910–1921. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
The standard modern monograph on White's chief justiceship — the Standard Oil 'rule of reason,' the wartime cases, and the Court's uneasy transit into the twentieth century.
Find a copy →President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (Earl Warren, chairman). Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1964.
The argument about it is sixty years old; Moke's life, above, takes the critical side.
Find a copy →Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States: Final Report. Washington, DC: Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, 2021.
The report President Biden's commission delivered in December 2021, co-chaired by Bob Bauer and Cristina Rodriguez: five chapters on the history of reform debates, the Court's size, term limits, its constitutional role and its procedures, setting out the arguments without recommending among them. iv and 288 pages, free at govinfo.
Read it →Presser, Stephen B. "Samuel Chase: In Defense of the Rule of Law and Against the Jeffersonians." Vanderbilt Law Review 62, no. 2 (2009).
The strongest sustained modern reassessment of Chase as a jurist, contending that the impeachment has obscured his legal ability — his positions on judicial review, natural law, jury trials, treason, sedition, and federal judicial power.
Read it →Presser, Stephen B. "The Verdict on Samuel Chase and His 'Apologist.'". In Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John Marshall (1998).
The best concise, Court-centered introduction — Chase's Federalist understanding of judicial duty, his opinions in Hylton and Calder v. Bull, his circuit work, and the conduct that culminated in impeachment.
Find a copy →Presser, Stephen B. The Original Misunderstanding: The English, the Americans, and the Dialectic of Federalist Jurisprudence. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1991.
Prettyman, Barrett, Jr. Death and the Supreme Court. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.
Capital cases told one at a time, 311 pages from Harcourt, Brace and World in 1961, catalogued under capital punishment; the shelf's first book on the death penalty by twelve years, and Goldberg used the same title for an article in 1987. No copy found online. Not read.
Pringle, Henry F. The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (2 vols.). New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939.
The standard biography, by the author of the Pulitzer-winning Theodore Roosevelt life.
Read it →Pritchard, A. C., and Robert B. Thompson. A History of Securities Law in the Supreme Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Securities law at the Court from the New Deal on, in five eras from Roosevelt's triumph to Powell's counter-revolution, written from the justices' papers by A. C. Pritchard of Michigan and Robert Thompson of Georgetown; Oxford, March 2023, 384 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Pritchett, C. Herman. Civil Liberties and the Vinson Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
The Vinson years read for civil liberties, 296 pages from Chicago in 1954, the year after Vinson died, catalogued under civil rights. No copy found online. Not read.
Pritchett, C. Herman. Congress versus the Supreme Court, 1957-1960. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961.
Congress against the Court from 1957 to 1960, 168 pages from Minnesota in 1961, catalogued under legislative and judicial power together; Murphy's Congress and the Court covers the same fight from the other author's angle. Reprinted by Da Capo in 1973. No copy found online. Not read.
Pritchett, C. Herman. The Roosevelt Court: A Study in Judicial Politics and Values, 1937-1947. New York: Macmillan, 1948.
The book usually credited with first tabulating the justices' votes and reading them as blocs: 314 pages with diagrams from Macmillan in 1948, a study in judicial politics and values by its subtitle, covering the ten terms from 1937. Reprinted by Octagon in 1963. No copy found online. Not read.
“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Justice Brennan.” United States Reports 523 (1998).
The Court's own record of the May 22, 1998 memorial, and the fullest short life of him in print: the Bar's resolution runs from the father stoking the Ballantine furnaces to the ninetieth birthday in the courtroom, counts the work ('Justice Brennan authored 1,573 opinions: 533 opinions for the Court, 694 dissents, and 346 concurrences'), and records that 'In later years, Brennan was proud that the only Senate vote against his confirmation was cast by Senator McCarthy'; Rehnquist closes with 'a judge need not be a prima donna to have a lasting influence on our country's laws.'
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Justice Byron R. White.” United States Reports 537 (2002).
The November 18, 2002 memorial: the Bar's resolution (the beet fields 'from the time they could wield a hoe,' the Cotton Bowl, the Freedom Rides, 'To decide cases'), Solicitor General Olson and Attorney General Ashcroft, and Chief Justice Rehnquist's response, which calls him 'the 93rd Justice to serve on this Court and the first to have served as a Supreme Court law clerk.'
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Justice Goldberg.” United States Reports 498 (1990).
The October 15, 1990 memorial: the Bar's resolution (Northwestern first in his class, the bar 'by special dispensation' before he was twenty-one, the 1955 merger), Solicitor General Starr and Attorney General Thornburgh, and Chief Justice Rehnquist's response, which says that of all his public roles 'he liked that of Associate Justice most of all.'
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Justice Marshall.” United States Reports 510 (1993).
The November 15, 1993 memorial: Solicitor General Drew Days presenting the Bar's resolutions, Attorney General Janet Reno, and Chief Justice Rehnquist presiding, on the twenty-four years and the career before them.
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Justice Potter Stewart.” United States Reports 479 (1986).
The Court's own record of the October 20, 1986 memorial: the Bar's resolution (which has him fearing that 'I know it when I see it' might become his epitaph, and offers an amendment), Solicitor General Charles Fried's account of a judge whose 'most consistent philosophy was his skepticism about the virtues of apparently consistent philosophies,' and Chief Justice Rehnquist's response, with the Reds, the fishing, and 'a superb craftsman of the written opinion.'
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Mr. Chief Justice Vinson.” United States Reports 349 (1954).
The Court's memorial, and the fullest free life of him: the Bar's resolution from the birth 'on the banks of the Big Sandy River in the little town of Louisa in Eastern Kentucky' and the father who 'was the town jailer,' through Centre College, where 'he graduated as the top-ranking student in his class in 1909,' the old Ninth District, 'the Democratic eclipse of 1928,' the Emergency Court of Appeals and the Treasury, to its portrait of 'A man of good will, friendly, approachable'; and Warren's reply, that 'he rose from humble beginnings to the highest offices in all three Branches of our Government.'
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Mr. Chief Justice Warren.” United States Reports 421 (1975).
The Court's own memorial: the Bar's resolution with its count of '52 years of official public service' and its 'three interrelated themes' of the Warren years (civil rights, 'democratic processes of self-government,' and 'an equitable system of criminal justice consistent with elemental human dignity'); Bork on a Chief whose respect for his colleagues' independence 'was a foundation for, rather than a relinquishment of, his leadership role'; Levi's 'He perceived the cases before him as human problems, not abstract issues'; and Burger on the lunch table where Warren laughed at the folklore about himself.
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Mr. Justice Clark.” United States Reports 434 (1978).
The Court's own memorial, and the best short life in print that is free: the Bar's resolution from 'An outgoing Texan, in manner and spirit' through Clark & Clark, the war frauds referred by 'a junior Senator from Missouri, Harry Truman,' the loyalty program and the first Attorney General's list, the steel seizure vote against 'his "best client,"' Mapp 'despite his firm belief in strong law enforcement,' Schempp 'although a deeply religious man,' the retirement 'at the peak of his judicial powers,' the Federal Judicial Center and 'all eleven Circuits'; Bell on the Mapp sentences; and Burger's reply, the keel of the Court and 'Just call me Tom.'
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Mr. Justice Harlan.” United States Reports 409 (1972).
The Court's own record of the October 24, 1972 memorial: the Bar's resolution with the life from James Harlan's naming of a son for John Marshall to the count of the work ('a total of 613 opinions, more than any other Justice during this period, of which 168 were opinions for the Court, 149 were concurring opinions and 296 were dissenting opinions'), its tribute to the output of a man 'severely handicapped by his impaired eyesight,' and the Chief Justice's description: 'His head and face had a sculptured aspect, the eyes deep set but very alert even in the years that his sight was failing.'
Read it →“Proceedings in the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Mr. Justice Minton.” United States Reports 384 (1966).
The fullest life of Minton in print that is free: the Bar's resolution runs from 'the hill hamlet of Georgetown' through the jobs at eight, Taft's classroom at Yale, the show-cause method at the Public Service Commission, the seat next to Truman, the 1937 plan and 'the Constitution of 1937 and not the Constitution of 1936,' the anti-lynching sentence, Willkie and Willis in 1940, 'By the way, Shay,' the two hundred Seventh Circuit opinions and the anemia of 1943; and Warren's reply reads the letter to the Judiciary Committee, 'when I refereed games I had no team,' and counts him 'the eighty-seventh Justice of this Court.'
Read it →Provine, Doris Marie. Case Selection in the United States Supreme Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
How cases are chosen, 214 pages from Chicago in 1980 on the certiorari process, catalogued under judicial review and judicial process; the study Perry's Deciding to Decide answered eleven years later. No copy found online. Not read.
Przybyszewski, Linda. The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
The finest intellectual biography — the book to read once Canellos has hooked you.
Find a copy →Purcell, Edward A., Jr. Antonin Scalia and American Constitutionalism: The Historical Significance of a Judicial Icon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
A full scholarly assessment of the thirty years, in three parts, Scalia as public actor, as justice and as historical figure, testing the originalism against the decisions on federalism, separation of powers and individual rights, with chapters on Heller, Bush v. Gore and the federal judicial power.
Find a copy →Purcell, Edward A., Jr. Brandeis and the Progressive Constitution: Erie, the Judicial Power, and the Politics of the Federal Courts in Twentieth-Century America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
The major scholarly study of Brandeis the judge rather than Brandeis the crusader — built around Erie, the most technical and most revealing of his great opinions, and what it shows about his theory of federal judicial power.
Find a copy →Pusey, Allen. “May 14, 1969: The Spectacular Fall of Abe Fortas.” ABA Journal (2004).
The resignation in a page, from the ABA's magazine: the Wolfson payments, the AU seminar money, the impeachment talk, and Warren's urging.
Find a copy →Pusey, Merlo J. Charles Evans Hughes (2 vols.). New York: Macmillan, 1951.
The standard biography, and a deserving winner of the 1952 Pulitzer Prize.
Read it →Pusey, Merlo J. The Supreme Court Crisis. New York: Macmillan, 1937.
The court-packing fight reported in its own year: 108 pages from Macmillan in 1937 by the man who would write the two-volume Hughes, catalogued under Roosevelt, political questions and judicial power. Reprinted by Da Capo in 1973 in its series on Roosevelt and the New Deal. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Radcliff, William Franklin. Sherman Minton: Indiana's Supreme Court Justice. Indianapolis: Guild Press of Indiana, 1996.
A second biography for a shelf that had one: 252 illustrated pages from the Guild Press of Indiana in 1996, a year before Gugin and St. Clair's, and written from the home state, as the subtitle says.
Ragan, Allen E. Chief Justice Taft. Columbus, OH: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1938.
The chief justiceship alone, in 139 pages from the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society in 1938, eight years after Taft's death, in its Ohio Historical Collections series; the subject headings pair the biography with constitutional cases.
Ratner, Sidney. Was the Supreme Court Packed by President Grant? Political Science Quarterly 50, no. 3 (1935): 343-358.
Sixteen pages in the Political Science Quarterly for 1935 asking whether Grant packed the Court, which is to say whether the two appointments of 1870 were made to reverse the Legal Tender decision; the question was two years from being asked about another president. No free copy found. Not read.
Ray, Clyde H. John Marshall's Constitutionalism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2019.
A short study of Marshall as a political thinker rather than a judge, reading the constitutional theory out of the major opinions: the Constitution's fundamental legitimacy, its supremacy over national and state policy, its part in defining citizenship, and its contribution to American nationalism.
Find a copy →Ray, Laura Krugman. “The Legacy of a Supreme Court Clerkship: Stephen Breyer and Arthur Goldberg.” Penn State Law Review 115 (2010): 83.
What the clerk took from the justice: Breyer's 1964-65 year in Goldberg's chambers set against his own later method, with Breyer's recollection of a man 'happy on the Court; indeed he was in his element.'
Find a copy →Rebe, Ryan J. The Partisan Court: The Era of Political Partisanship on the U.S. Supreme Court. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021.
Ryan Rebe of William Paterson aggregates two decades of election-law decisions to show party-line voting, and argues that the results sit badly with the originalism and stare decisis the majority professes; Lexington, October 2021, 112 pages. Not read.
Reft, Ryan. “United States v. Nixon.” Law and History Review, The Docket (2024).
The drafting of the tapes opinion from the justices' papers, on the fiftieth anniversary: how a Court that might have produced several opinions for a unanimous result produced one, and whose hands were in it.
Find a copy →Regan, Richard J. A Constitutional History of the U.S. Supreme Court. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015.
Richard Regan of Fordham on the Court through its landmark decisions, court by court from Marbury to the Affordable Care Act, with brief lives of the justices opening each section; Catholic University of America Press, April 2015, 394 pages. Not read.
Rehnquist, William H. All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Rehnquist on civil liberties under the pressure of war — from Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus to the Japanese-American internment — arguing that the Constitution's protections have always bent, and perhaps should, in wartime.
Read it →Rehnquist, William H. Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
His last book — a study of the Hayes–Tilden deadlock of 1876 and the electoral commission that broke it, written by the Chief Justice who had just presided over Bush v. Gore.
Read it →Rehnquist, William H. Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson. New York: William Morrow, 1992.
A sitting Chief Justice's lucid narrative comparison of the two great early impeachments — of Justice Samuel Chase and of President Andrew Johnson.
Find a copy →Rehnquist, William H. The Supreme Court: How It Was, How It Is. 1987; rev. ed., The Supreme Court, 2001.
Rehnquist's own accessible history of the institution he led — part narrative, part memoir, revised and expanded from his 1987 original.
Read it →Reid, Whitelaw. Ohio in the War: Her Statesmen, Her Generals, and Soldiers (2 vols.). Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1868.
The contemporaneous account, published while Woods was still a circuit judge and written by a journalist who had covered Ohio politics himself.
Read it →Reitano, Joanne. Charles Evans Hughes and the Dawning of Modern America. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2025.
The first comprehensive Hughes biography in over seventy years — since Pusey won the Pulitzer in 1952.
Find a copy →Renstrom, Peter G. The Stone Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001.
The reference study of the brief, fractious Court Stone led as Chief (1941–46) — Renstrom on the wartime cases, the Japanese-American internment, and the bitter Black–Jackson feud that erupted on his watch.
Read it →Renstrom, Peter G. The Taft Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
The Taft Court in the ABC-CLIO handbook form, 331 pages with portraits from 2003 in four parts: the Court and the period, the justices, significant decisions, legacy and impact; with it the series on this bibliography runs Taney, Chase, Taft, Hughes, Stone, Vinson.
“Retirement of Justice Brennan.” United States Reports 498 (1990).
The Court's own record of the retirement: Rehnquist from the bench on the first Monday of October 1990, that 'for the first time in 34 years, a Term of the Court commences without our colleague Justice William J. Brennan sitting beside us on the bench'; the eight Justices' letter of September 6, with its 'period exceeded by only four other members of the Court'; and Brennan's reply of September 25, that the service had been 'a rare privilege, but equally rare has been the chance to form so many rich friendships in the course of that work.'
Read it →“Retirement of Mr. Chief Justice Warren.” United States Reports 395 (1969).
We serve no minority.
Read it →“Retirement of Mr. Justice Clark.” United States Reports 388 (1967).
The leave-taking, in the Court's record: Warren's 'we view his departure with mixed feelings' and 'He has been a great companion for us,' and Clark's reply, with its thanks to 'the best client of my life, President Harry S Truman,' to thirty-six clerks and to Mary, and the Crier's words to close.
Read it →“Retirement of Mr. Justice Harlan.” United States Reports 404 (1971).
The Court's two notices, in the Chief Justice's words from the bench: on October 4, 1971, that 'Ill health led Mr. Justice Harlan to submit to retirement when his high sense of duty persuaded him he could not continue to carry out his obligations to the Court'; and on January 10, 1972, 'the departure of a beloved friend whose warmth and gaiety lightened all the burdens and cheered all the gatherings of the Justices of this Court for 16 years.'
Read it →“Retirement of Mr. Justice Minton.” United States Reports 352 (1956).
The leave-taking in the Court's own record: Warren's 'He has been more than our associate.
Read it →Richards, Mark J. The Politics of Freedom of Expression: The Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Mark Richards of Grand Valley State on freedom-of-expression decisions from the Warren Court to 2012, and on the jurisprudential regimes he argues shape how content-based and content-neutral restrictions are treated; Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 220 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Richotte, Keith, Jr. The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told: Native America, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Constitution. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.
How the Court's justification for plenary power over Native nations moved from race in the 1880s to the Constitution by the 2000s, told through trickster-story conventions by Keith Richotte of Arizona; Stanford, 2025, 296 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Rivers, Christina R. The Congressional Black Caucus, Minority Voting Rights, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Christina Rivers setting the Congressional Black Caucus's constitutional position on race-conscious districting against the Court's, from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Shaw v. Reno and the cases after it; Michigan, 2012, 228 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Robarge, David. A Chief Justice's Progress: John Marshall from Revolutionary Virginia to the Supreme Court. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Marshall before the Court: 364 illustrated pages from Greenwood in 2000 in its Contributions in American History series, catalogued under the Revolution as well as the judge, and stopping, as the subtitle says, at the appointment.
Robert H. Jackson Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1816–1983.
The Library's collection, 75,015 items in 259 containers and 110 linear feet by the finding aid's count (the catalog now says 77,000), bulk 1934 to 1954: 'Jackson's papers are complete for his years on the court except for the 1945 term when he was United States Chief of Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials,' and the biographical file holds 'an autobiography started by Jackson in 1944 which covers his life through his appointment as attorney general' beside the transcript of the Columbia oral history of 1952 and 1953.
Read it →Roberts, John G., Jr. Confirmation Opening Statement (“An Umpire Calls Balls and Strikes”). 2005.
Roberts's brief, famous statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the credo by which his whole tenure has been measured.
Roberts, John G., Jr., Stephen Breyer, Kevin Newsom, et al. “In Memoriam: Justice David H. Souter.” Harvard Law Review 139: 454. 2025.
The tributes published after Souter's death in May 2025 — the Chief Justice, Justice Breyer, a former clerk now on the Eleventh Circuit, and three leading scholars, incorporating the Court's own memorial remarks.
Read it →Roberts, Owen J. The Court and the Constitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951.
Roberts's one book, 122 pages of lectures published by Harvard in 1951, six years after he left the Court to be dean at Pennsylvania: the man of the switch on the Court, the Constitution, taxation and the police power, as the record catalogs it.
Read it →Robertson, David. Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.
The definitive biography, and a gripping one about a consummate political operator.
Read it →Robertson, Lindsay G. Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Johnson v. M'Intosh from the land-company papers: the Illinois and Wabash companies, their petitions, the case before the Court and the opinion of 1823 that made discovery into title, in a book from Oxford in 2005 with the 1810 memorial and the agreed statement of facts as appendices. Search-only at HathiTrust. Not read.
Robin, Corey. The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019.
The most illuminating single book on how Thomas thinks, and a serious attempt to take his ideas seriously.
Robins, William M. “A Bibliography of Associate Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.” Seton Hall Law Review 12 (1982): 430.
The checklist for everything Brennan wrote and everything written about him through 1981, in sections: his articles, his pamphlets, his speeches, and the appraisals of him.
Read it →Robinson, Kimberly. American Justice 2017: The Supreme Court in Crisis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Kimberly Robinson of U.S. Law Week on October Term 2016, Gorsuch's first; Penn Press, October 2017, 176 pages, the fourth of the annual six. Not read.
Find a copy →Rodell, Fred. Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court from 1790 to 1955. New York: Random House, 1955.
A political history of the Court in 338 pages from Random House in 1955, from 1790 to the year of writing. Reprinted by Rothman in 1988. No copy found online. Not read.
Read it →Rogers, James R., Roy B. Flemming, and Jon R. Bond, eds. Institutional Games and the U.S. Supreme Court. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
Game-theoretic and formal studies of the Court's relations with Congress, the president and the lower courts, edited by James R. Rogers, Roy B. Flemming and Jon R. Bond, with Shepsle, Martin, Zorn, Vanberg, Carrubba, Hammond, Bonneau, Sheehan, Cameron, Kornhauser, Bueno de Mesquita, Stephenson, Lindquist, Haire and Baum among the contributors; Virginia, 2006, 320 pages, in the Constitutionalism and Democracy series. Not read.
Find a copy →Roosevelt, Kermit, III. The Myth of Judicial Activism: Making Sense of Supreme Court Decisions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
Kermit Roosevelt III on judicial activism as a label that explains nothing, with a model of how courts build doctrine to implement constitutional meaning that sets out to reconcile a fixed Constitution with an evolving one and then sorts the controversial decisions by whether they can be legitimately justified; Yale, 2006, 262 pages. Not read.
Root, Damon. Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Damon Root's libertarian history of the long argument between judicial restraint and judicial engagement, traced from Reconstruction to the modern fights over guns, gay rights and health care, and cutting across party lines; Palgrave Macmillan, November 2014, 274 pages. Not read.
Roper, Donald Malcolm. Mr. Justice Thompson and the Constitution. New York: Garland, 1987.
The whole arc: the Poughkeepsie law office shared with Gilbert Livingston, the New York bench under and after Kent, the Navy Department, the presidential itch, and twenty years of judicial work — including the Cherokee dissent.
Find a copy →Roper, Donald. “Livingston, Henry Brockholst (1757–1823).” Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, ed. Leonard W. Levy et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1986).
The one modern essay that takes the silence as a problem to be explained.
Find a copy →Rosen, James. Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986. Regnery, 2023.
The first major Scalia biography since Murphy — volume one of Rosen's two-volume life, written with extensive family cooperation, carrying Scalia from Queens through the appellate bench to the 1986 appointment.
Find a copy →Rosen, James. Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986 to 2001. Regnery, 2026.
Published in February 2026 — the first fifteen Court years: the dissents that built a movement, the Thomas alliance, the feuds and friendships.
Find a copy →Rosen, Jeffrey. Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law. New York: Henry Holt, 2019.
Two decades of interviews with Jeffrey Rosen, edited into a warm, wide-ranging portrait of her thinking on the Constitution, marriage, opera, and the craft of dissent — Ginsburg in her own measured voice.
Read it →Rosen, Jeffrey. Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.
The best brief introduction — Jeffrey Rosen's compact life in Yale's Jewish Lives series, framing Brandeis as a moral prophet of privacy, free speech, and 'the curse of bigness' whose warnings read as freshly today as a century ago.
Read it →Rosen, Jeffrey. The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America. New York: Times Books, 2007.
Jeffrey Rosen's history of the Court told through four rivalries, Marshall against Jefferson, the first Harlan against Holmes, Black against Douglas and Rehnquist against Scalia, with the argument that the collegial temperament proved more influential on the bench than the rigid one; Times Books, January 2007, 274 pages. Not read.
Rosen, Jeffrey. William Howard Taft (The American Presidents Series). New York: Times Books, 2018.
The best brief introduction to the whole career — Jeffrey Rosen's compact life in the American Presidents series, unusually attentive to the constitutional convictions that made Taft a reluctant president and a contented Chief Justice.
Read it →Rosenkranz, E. Joshua, and Bernard Schwartz, eds. Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
A Brennan Center collection of essays by judges, scholars, and advocates assessing his influence across the whole span of constitutional law — the fullest measure of his reach, taken just after his retirement.
Read it →Ross, Michael A. Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.
The modern biography and the natural first read — the first full life of Miller in over sixty years.
Find a copy →Ross, Michael A. “Obstructing Reconstruction: John Archibald Campbell and the Legal Campaign against Louisiana's Republican Government, 1868–1873.” Civil War History 49, no. 3 (2003).
The definitive modern account of Campbell's post-war career — showing that Slaughterhouse was not a one-off argument but a front in his deliberate litigation war against Louisiana's Reconstruction government.
Ross, William G. The Chief Justiceship of Charles Evans Hughes, 1930-1941. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.
The South Carolina volume on the chief justiceship, by William Ross of Samford's Cumberland School of Law: the Hughes Court's passage from arbiter of economic regulation to guardian of personal liberty, with new protections for speech, press, religion, criminal defendants and racial minorities.
Find a copy →Rossum, Ralph A. Antonin Scalia's Jurisprudence: Text and Tradition. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
The systematic account of the theory — Rossum on how originalism and textualism actually operate across Scalia's opinions, and where the two commitments pull against each other.
Read it →Rossum, Ralph A. Understanding Clarence Thomas: The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Restoration. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014.
The fullest account of Thomas's originalism — Rossum on his willingness, unmatched on the Court, to discard precedent and return doctrine to the Constitution's original meaning, from the Commerce Clause to the Establishment Clause.
Roth, Larry M. “Remembering 1965: Abe Fortas and the Supreme Court.” Mercer Law Review 28 (1977): 967.
The 1965 appointment told as a case study in cronyism: Johnson's refusals refused, the Goldberg seat emptied for the purpose, and the friend who did not want the job.
Read it →Rothe, Anna, ed. Current Biography: Who's News and Why, 1949. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1950.
Friedman and Israel's source for 'a useful account of his career before he joined the Court': the year's Current Biography entry, written in the season of the appointment.
Read it →Rotunda, Ronald D., ed. Six Justices on Civil Rights. London; New York: Oceana Publications, 1983.
Six David C. Baum Memorial Lectures on six justices and civil rights, collected by Ronald Rotunda in 1983: Frank on Black, Kurland on Jackson, Coleman on Frankfurter, Countryman on Douglas, Nathanson on Brandeis, Pollak on Rutledge; 211 pages with portraits from Oceana.
Rotunda, Ronald. John Marshall and the Cases That United the States of America. Twelve Tables Press, 2018.
Ronald Rotunda's abridgement of Beveridge, published by Twelve Tables Press in 2018: the four volumes of 1916 to 1919 cut to one and organised around the cases that made a nation out of a confederation, for readers who will not face the monument whole.
Rountree, Clarke. Judging the Supreme Court: Constructions of Motives in Bush v. Gore. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2007.
Clarke Rountree's rhetorical analysis of how the opinions in Bush v. Gore, and the commentary that followed them, attribute motive to judges; Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2007, xvi and 510 pages, in the Rhetoric and Public Affairs series. Not read.
Rountree, Clarke. Overturned: The Rhetoric of Overruling in the United States Supreme Court. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2025.
How the Court has justified overruling nearly three hundred of its own precedents, read as rhetoric by Clarke Rountree of Alabama in Huntsville; University of Alabama Press, 2025, 384 pages. Not read.
Rowan, Carl T. Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.
An intimate close-up by the pioneering Black journalist Carl Rowan, who knew Marshall for decades and drew on long, candid interviews.
Read it →Rudman, Warren B. Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate. New York: Random House, 1996.
The sponsor's memoir: the New Hampshire senator who put Souter's name in front of the Bush White House and shepherded the 1990 confirmation, on that and on twelve years of Senate fights.
Read it →Ruger, Todd. American Justice 2018: The Shifting Supreme Court. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Todd Ruger of CQ Roll Call on October Term 2017 and Kennedy's retirement at the end of it; Penn Press, October 2018, 144 pages, the fifth and shortest of the annual six. Not read.
Find a copy →Rugg, Arthur P. "William Cushing," Yale Law Journal 30, no. 2 (1920).
Written by the sitting Chief Justice of Massachusetts, who had access to family papers and contemporaneous accounts no longer easily available — the manuscript sketch by Charles Cushing Paine, the New England Palladium obituary of 1810, and Josiah Quincy's personal assessment.
Find a copy →Russomanno, Joseph. The "Stench" of Politics: Polarization and Worldview on the Supreme Court. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023.
Joseph Russomanno of Arizona State's Cronkite School on the Court's politicisation and the repairs he proposes, among them a Court of thirteen or fifteen sitting in panels; Lexington, 2023, with a foreword by Rodney Smolla. Not read.
Rutland, George H., ed. Supreme Court of the United States: A Bibliography with Indexes. 2006.
The only attempt anyone has made to update Martin & Goehlert, and a cautionary one: an unannotated alphabetical list whose index the Oxford Bibliographies survey calls “extremely cursory and rather idiosyncratic,” skipping scholarly works in favor of film and television entries. On this shelf because it exists, not because it competes.
Rutledge, Wiley. A Declaration of Legal Faith. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1947.
Rutledge's one book, the lectures the University of Kansas Press published in 1947, two years before his death at fifty-five: the Lawbook Exchange, which reprinted it in 2004, calls him 'a staunch defender of the New Deal' who 'states his faith in judicial and governmental activism', with a second part on 'The Commerce Clause: A Chapter in Democratic Living'.
Find a copy →Salamone, Michael F. Perceptions of a Polarized Court: How Division among Justices Shapes the Supreme Court's Public Image. Temple University Press, 2018.
Michael Salamone of Washington State on whether division among the justices damages the legitimacy of what they decide, and the finding that runs the other way: dissent may help secure public support by appealing to democratic values; Temple, October 2018, 214 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Salmon P. Chase Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1755–1898.
The manuscripts behind Niven's five printed volumes: 12,500 items on 38 reels of microfilm, 'diaries, correspondence, letterbooks, speeches, memoranda, financial papers, legal documents, and miscellany' from the Cincinnati law practice and the Liberty Party through the Treasury, the Chief Justiceship and the Johnson impeachment.
Read it →Samuel Freeman Miller Correspondence — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1854-1887.
A small collection with an unusually high strike rate: 185 items in two containers, 0.8 linear feet and three reels of microfilm, nearly all of it letters from Miller to his brother-in-law William Pitt Ballinger (1825 to 1888), a Galveston attorney and a former Confederate official.
Read it →Sandra Day O'Connor Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1944-2008.
851 containers, 256,575 items, 339.8 linear feet and 356 digital files, running from 1944 to 2008 with the bulk from 1981 to 2006: the Arizona legislature and the Arizona bench, then a quarter century of Supreme Court files, then a writings file running to 2008.
Read it →Saunders, Robert, Jr. John Archibald Campbell: Southern Moderate, 1811–1889. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1997.
The prodigy from Georgia (college at eleven, the Alabama bar at eighteen by special act) through the Mobile practice, the extraordinary 1853 appointment, the eight-year tenure, the desperate 1861 mediation, the resignation, the Confederate years, the imprisonment, and the astonishing third act as the Supreme Court's leading advocate.
Read it →Savage, David G. Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010.
The standard two-volume reference on the Court, begun by Elder Witt for Congressional Quarterly and carried on by David Savage, in a fifth edition of 1,544 pages updated through the 2008-09 term with Roberts, Alito and Sotomayor, a new chapter on the Second Amendment and the Heller, Boumediene and Roper decisions; CQ Press, June 2010. Not read.
Find a copy →Savage, David G. The Supreme Court and Individual Rights. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2009.
The individual-rights half of CQ's Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court published on its own, organised around freedom of expression, political participation, the Second Amendment, criminal justice, equal protection and privacy and carried through the 2007-08 term, with a glossary, a citation guide and biographies of the justices; David Savage, CQ Press, July 2009, 584 pages, a fifth edition. Not read.
Savage, David G. The Supreme Court and the Powers of the American Government. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2009.
The structural half of CQ's Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court published on its own: federal jurisdiction and judicial restraint, the Court's dealings with Congress and the president including privilege, immunity, the terrorism cases and the commerce clause, and the pressure the other branches exert back; David Savage, CQ Press, July 2009, 672 pages, a second edition. Not read.
Savage, David G. Turning Right: The Making of the Rehnquist Supreme Court. New York: Wiley, 1992.
The Los Angeles Times Supreme Court correspondent's reported narrative of the Court's rightward turn under Rehnquist, drawn from the opinions and from unattributed interviews with justices and clerks.
Read it →Scalia, Antonin, and Bryan A. Garner. Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges. St. Paul, MN: Thomson/West, 2008.
Scalia and Garner on the art of persuading judges — the advocacy companion to their Reading Law, addressed to the lawyer at the lectern rather than to the reader of statutes.
Read it →Scalia, Antonin, and Bryan A. Garner. Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. St. Paul, MN: Thomson/West, 2012.
Scalia's fullest statement of method, written with the lexicographer Bryan Garner — a systematic catalog of the canons of interpretation and the case for reading statutes and the Constitution by their text.
Read it →Scalia, Antonin. A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Scalia's own manifesto, and the clearest short statement of the philosophy he spent a career advancing.
Read it →Scalia, Antonin. Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived. Edited by Christopher J. Scalia and Edward Whelan. New York: Crown Forum, 2017.
The posthumous collection of his speeches — on the Constitution, faith, friendship, and the well-lived life — edited by his son and a former clerk, with a foreword by his friend and opposite Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Read it →Scalia, Antonin. The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. Edited by Jeffrey S. Sutton and Edward Whelan. New York: Forum Books, 2020.
The best single-volume selection of his opinions and essays, arranged by theme, with a foreword by Justice Elena Kagan — the efficient way to meet Scalia the writer and arguer.
Read it →Scalia, Antonin. “Oral History of Justice Antonin Scalia.” Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, Oral History Project (1992).
A single session with Judith R. Hope on December 5, 1992, six years into the tenure: Queens, Xavier, Georgetown, Harvard, the Nixon and Ford years at the Office of Legal Counsel, told at length in his own voice before the public persona hardened.
Find a copy →Schmidhauser, John R. Stare Decisis, Dissent, and the Background of the Justices. University of Toronto Law Journal 14, no. 2 (1962): 194–212.
The starting point for the claim that where a justice came from predicts how they vote, opening on the Senate’s own arguments about Hughes’s corporate practice and Black’s Klan membership, and asking whether background, selection method and prior judicial experience leave a trace in the votes.
Find a copy →Schneider, Alan Neil. "Robert Trimble: A Kentucky Justice on the Supreme Court." Kentucky Bar Journal 12, no. 1 (1947): 21–30.
The bar tradition's tribute — shorter and more celebratory than Goff, with local detail on the Paris practice, the Court of Appeals service, and the district-court years riding herd on Kentucky's land litigation.
Schroeder, David. “Joining the Court: Pierce Butler.” Journal of Supreme Court History 35, no. 2 (2010): 144–165.
The railroad lawyer, the Catholic seat, and the campaign that put him on the bench, revisited.
Find a copy →Schuckers, J. W. The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase. New York: D. Appleton, 1874.
The contemporary authorized life, by Chase's private secretary at the Treasury and published the year after his death — partisan and adulatory, but close to the documents and the man, and a primary source in its own right.
Read it →Schultz, David A. Constitutional Precedent in US Supreme Court Reasoning. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022.
David Schultz of Hamline catalogues the occasions on which the Court has overruled its own constitutional precedents, from the founding to 2020, and counts them court by court; Edward Elgar, 2022, 189 pages. Not read.
Schultz, David A., and Howard Schweber, eds. The Conservative Revolution of Antonin Scalia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018.
Thirteen essays by legal and political scientists taking the measure of the legacy, and reaching a verdict the title does not promise: that the doctrinal influence was far smaller than either allies hoped or critics feared, and that the real revolution was in conservative political culture and in a combative judicial style.
Schwartz, Bernard, ed. The Burger Court: Counter-Revolution or Confirmation? New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Often confused with the 1987 collection; it's a separate book, and the more considered of the two.
Find a copy →Schwartz, Bernard, ed. The Warren Court: A Retrospective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
The Warren Court looked back on, 406 pages of essays from Oxford in 1996 edited by Bernard Schwartz, who did the same for the Burger Court two years later. No copy found online. Not read.
Schwartz, Bernard. A History of the Supreme Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
A one-volume narrative history running from 1790 to 1992, justice by justice, with set- piece chapters on Dred Scott, Lochner, Brown, and Roe and a partial rehabilitation of Roger Taney.
Read it →Schwartz, Bernard. Behind Bakke: Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court. New York: New York University Press, 1988.
The classic inside-the-Court reconstruction of Bakke from the justices' internal papers — with Powell's lone controlling opinion, the diversity rationale that governed admissions for forty-five years, at its center.
Find a copy →Schwartz, Bernard. Decision: How the Supreme Court Decides Cases. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
How the Court actually reaches a decision — conference votes, switched votes, circulated drafts — reconstructed from interviews and unpublished papers, and frankly admiring of Earl Warren's leadership.
Schwartz, Bernard. Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court — A Judicial Biography. New York: New York University Press, 1983.
The classic account of the Warren Court from the inside, by a legal scholar with access to the justices' papers and conference notes.
Read it →Schwartz, Bernard. The New Right and the Constitution: Turning Back the Legal Clock. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990.
A prolific constitutional-law scholar's point-by-point answer to New Right jurisprudence: original intent as the impossible dream, revived economic liberties, takings, race, and administrative law.
Schwartz, Bernard. The Supreme Court: Constitutional Revolution in Retrospect. New York: Ronald Press, 1957.
Bernard Schwartz's retrospect of the constitutional revolution, published four years after Vinson's death, which Friedman and Israel set against Rodell as 'an account that is more sympathetic to Vinson's point of view.'
Read it →Schwartz, Bernard. The Unpublished Opinions of the Warren Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schwartz, Bernard. “Chief Justice Earl Warren: Super Chief in Action.” Tulsa Law Journal 33 (1997): 477.
Schwartz's fifty-page distillation of Super Chief, with the conference notes doing the work: Warren opening the Brown conference on segregation as resting 'upon a concept of the inherent inferiority of the colored race,' the question from the bench in criminal cases, 'but were you fair?', Brennan giving him the nickname, and the two versions of Eisenhower's remark, Ambrose's and Cray's.
Read it →Schwartz, Herman, ed. The Burger Years: Rights and Wrongs in the Supreme Court, 1969–1986. New York: Viking, 1987.
A companion assessment from the other direction — Herman Schwartz's collection weighing the Burger Court's real retreats on rights across seventeen years.
Read it →Schwartz, Herman, ed. The Rehnquist Court: Judicial Activism on the Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002.
The Rehnquist Court indicted for activism from the right, 276 pages of essays from Hill and Wang in 2002 edited by Herman Schwartz, who had done the same for the Burger years; catalogued under conservatism and the political aspects of judicial process. No copy found online. Not read.
Scott, John Anthony. “Justice Bradley's Evolving Concept of the Fourteenth Amendment from the Slaughterhouse Cases to the Civil Rights Cases.” Rutgers Law Review 25 (1971): 552.
The key study of the question every Bradley reader eventually asks: how the Slaughterhouse dissenter who read the Fourteenth Amendment broadly in 1873 became the author of the Civil Rights Cases that gutted it in 1883.
Seed, Geoffrey. James Wilson. Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1978.
The only full scholarly life written between Smith (1956) and the modern revival — a compact study by a British historian, strongest on Wilson's Scottish intellectual formation and his political thought.
Find a copy →Segall, Eric J. Originalism as Faith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Eric Segall argues that the Court almost never applies originalism and that judges and commentators use it as rhetoric, with a long section on the distance between Scalia's stated method and his practice; Cambridge, October 2018, 241 pages. Not read.
Segall, Eric J. Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court Is Not a Court and Its Justices Are Not Judges. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2012.
Eric Segall's argument that the justices decide fundamental questions on ideological preference rather than law, with a critique of life tenure and a call for transparency about what the Court actually does; Praeger, February 2012, 219 pages. Not read.
Seidel, Andrew L. American Crusade: How the Supreme Court Is Weaponizing Religious Freedom. New York: Union Square & Co., 2022.
Andrew Seidel, a church-state lawyer, reads thirty years of religious-liberty decisions, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Trump v. Hawaii, American Legion and Tandon among them, as a campaign rather than a doctrine, with a foreword by Erwin Chemerinsky; Union Square, September 2022, 320 pages. Not read.
Seitz, Steven T. Justice Rehnquist, the Supreme Court, and the Bill of Rights. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.
Steven Seitz of Illinois reads the Rehnquist years as a contest among three claimants to power, the state, the nation and the individual, and measures the decisions against a standard he calls sustainable case law rather than an ideological one: equal protection for women, due process, contracts, speech, sex and guns.
Seitz, Steven T. The Supreme Court, the Constitution, and William Rehnquist. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018.
The first of Steven Seitz's two Rehnquist volumes, 286 pages from Lexington in September 2018: how the framers wrote a constitution general enough to last, how the Court has read its clauses, and how it built the rules of justiciability that limit its own review, traced from Marshall through the Civil War, laissez-faire, the New Deal and the civil rights era to what the publisher calls Rehnquist's often hapless efforts at the end.
Shally-Jensen, Michael, ed. Defining Documents in American History: Supreme Court Decisions (1803-2017). Salem Press, 2017.
Sixty landmark rulings from 1803 to 2017 in three chronological periods, each with a critical essay giving the summary, the author, a document analysis and the essential themes, edited by Michael Shally-Jensen; Salem Press, November 2017, two volumes and 720 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Shannon, William V. “The Common Sense of Mr. Justice Brennan.” Catholic University Law Review 11 (1962): 3.
The five-year appraisal, by the head of the New York Post's Washington bureau, in the issue the Catholic University Law Review gave to Brennan's first five terms: 'His approach to every case is practical, specific, factual.
Read it →Shapiro, David L., ed. The Evolution of a Judicial Philosophy: Selected Opinions and Papers of Justice John M. Harlan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Harlan curated by his own former clerk — the opinions and papers that fixed his reputation as the conservative conscience of the Warren Court, published while he still sat.
Find a copy →Shapiro, Ilya. Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America's Highest Court. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2020.
Ilya Shapiro's history of confirmation politics and survey of the reform proposals, written from the premise that the stakes rose as government's reach grew; Regnery Gateway, September 2020, in an extent the carriers cannot agree on. Not read.
Shelden, Rachel A. “Anatomy of a Presidential Campaign from the Supreme Court Bench: John McLean, Levi Woodbury, and the Election of 1848.” Journal of Supreme Court History 47, no. 3 (2022).
The major modern study of the thing McLean is famous for — running for president from the bench, without apology, in an era that considered it normal.
Find a copy →Sherman Minton Letters, 1949–1955 — Indiana Historical Society (collection guide, SC1095). Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1949–1955.
One folder, four letters, and the best private sentence on Brown from a justice who joined it: to an old Quaker acquaintance on June 4, 1955, four days after Brown II, 'courts are awkward institutions and it is very difficult to enforce their decrees if there isn't reasonable acceptance.'
Find a copy →Sherman Minton Papers — Harry S. Truman Presidential Library (finding aid). Independence, Missouri: Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, 1949–1956.
The 'small collection' Friedman and Israel's chapter names, and the Library's finding aid says exactly what it is: 'printed and typed drafts of judicial opinions, handwritten notes, memoranda, letters, and other documents,' for the cases in which he wrote for the Court and no others, arranged by decision date, about 6,800 pages, with nothing from the Senate or the White House.
Find a copy →Shesol, Jeff. Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.
Roosevelt's war with the Court told at full length: the New Deal decisions of 1935–36, the Court-packing plan of 1937, and a political defeat that remade constitutional law regardless.
Shils, Edward B. “Arthur Goldberg: Proof of the American Dream.” Monthly Labor Review 120 (1997): 56.
The labor years from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own journal: the 1938 Newspaper Guild strike, the OSS Labor Division, the CIO and the Steelworkers, the 1955 merger, and the Labor Department, by a Penn professor who knew the movement.
Find a copy →Shiras, George, 3rd. Justice George Shiras, Jr., of Pittsburgh: A Chronicle of His Family, Life and Times. Edited by Winfield Shiras. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1953.
The only book-length life, and a family production: begun by the justice's son — George Shiras 3rd, the wildlife-photography pioneer and one-term congressman — and completed after his death by a grandson, Winfield Shiras, for the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Find a copy →Shogan, Robert. A Question of Judgment: The Fortas Case and the Struggle for the Supreme Court. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.
The first full account of the scandal that brought Fortas down — Robert Shogan's contemporary narrative of the 1968 chief-justice filibuster and the financial arrangement that forced the only resignation-under-fire in the Court's modern history.
Read it →Shogan, Robert. Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal. Ivan R. Dee, 2006.
Robert Shogan on the two things that turned opinion against Roosevelt after the 1936 landslide, the sit-down strikes and the Court-packing plan, by a former national political correspondent for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times; Ivan R. Dee, July 2006, 288 pages. Not read.
Sickels, Robert Judd. John Paul Stevens and the Constitution: The Search for Balance. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.
An early study of Stevens's jurisprudence, written in his second decade on the Court — the first attempt to find the method behind his famously independent, case-by-case opinions.
Read it →Silver, David M. Lincoln's Supreme Court. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956.
The definitive study of the five justices Lincoln named: the politics that put Swayne in John McLean's Ohio seat in 1862 (McLean had recommended him repeatedly before dying), Lincoln's criteria — Union loyalty, antislavery, geographic fit — and the wartime Court that upheld the blockade, the greenbacks, and martial law.
Read it →Silverstein, Mark. Judicious Choices: The New Politics of Supreme Court Confirmations. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
How confirmation became spectacle: the deferential, leadership-dominated process dies with the Fortas chief-justiceship fight of 1968 and is replaced by a democratized, media-saturated public battle, carried here through Scalia, Kennedy, Souter and Thomas. Revised in 2007.
Read it →Simon, James F. Courting History: A Supreme Court Historian Reflects on His Life and Career. Austin: Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, 2025.
The memoir of James F. Simon, whose books on Marshall, Taney, Hughes, Douglas, Black and Frankfurter, the Rehnquist Court, and Eisenhower and Warren are each in this bibliography: segregated Fort Worth, Yale Law, the interviews with justices behind the books; Briscoe Center, May 2025, 304 pages, and his papers are at the Center. Not read.
Find a copy →Simon, James F. Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties. New York: Liveright, 2018.
Simon, James F. FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle over the New Deal. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
The best book on the epic of 1937, told as a dual biography of the two men at its center.
Find a copy →Simon, James F. Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
The first major biography, written soon after Douglas's death by a respected legal journalist.
Find a copy →Simon, James F. Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President's War Powers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
The standard dual study of the great collision — Dred Scott, Merryman, and the war powers, told through the two men who embodied the argument.
Find a copy →Simon, James F. The Antagonists: Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter and Civil Liberties in Modern America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
The standard narrative account of the feud that organized the mid-century Court — Black's populist absolutism against Frankfurter's professorial restraint, told as a double portrait.
Simon, James F. The Center Holds: The Power Struggle Inside the Rehnquist Court. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
An argument that the Rehnquist revolution failed, tracking race, abortion, criminal law, and the First Amendment through the moderate center of O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter.
Read it →Simon, James F. What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
The standard popular account of the defining rivalry — Marshall and his cousin Jefferson fighting over what the Constitution actually created, from Marbury through Burr.
Find a copy →Simon, Paul. Advice & Consent: Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, and the Intriguing History of the Supreme Court’s Nomination Battles. Washington, DC: National Press Books, 1992.
Written from the Judiciary Committee dais by the Illinois Democrat who voted against both Bork and Thomas: the two battles set against two centuries of confirmation history, plus proposed reforms.
Sklut, Ronald; Justine S. Mann; John R. Schmidhauser. "A Study in Divided Loyalties" (Alabama Lawyer, 1959), "The Political Thought of John Archibald Campbell" (Alabama L. Rev., 1970) & "Jeremy Bentham, the Contract Clause and Justice Campbell" (Vanderbilt L. Rev., 1958).
Three angles, as the FJC's bibliography lists them: Sklut's long study of the divided loyalties, Mann on the political thought of the young fire-breather turned moderate, and Schmidhauser's gem — the justice as Benthamite, reading utilitarian jurisprudence on an antebellum bench.
Slater, Stephanie L. Edward Terry Sanford: A Tennessean on the U.S. Supreme Court. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018.
The first and only full biography of Sanford — the courtly Tennessean remembered for one sentence (Gitlow's assumption that the First Amendment binds the states) and for dying the same day as Taft, which cost him even his own funeral's headlines.
Find a copy →Slaughter, Thomas P. Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
The standard account of the 1851 Christiana resistance and its astonishing aftermath: the largest treason prosecution in American history, aimed at Quaker bystanders and free Black defendants.
Find a copy →Sloan, Cliff, and David McKean. The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009.
The best general-reader narrative of Marbury v. Madison — the midnight judges, the withheld commission, and how Marshall turned a political trap into the foundation of judicial review.
Read it →Sloan, Cliff. The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made. New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.
Cliff Sloan on the wartime Court of Roosevelt's seven appointees and their relations with the President who made them; PublicAffairs, September 2023, 512 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Sloss, David L. People v. the Court: The Next Revolution in Constitutional Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
David Sloss of Santa Clara on judicial review as a usurpation of the people's own authority over government, with reforms to restore it; Cambridge, August 2025, 290 pages. Not read.
Sloss, David L., Michael D. Ramsey, and William S. Dodge, eds. International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
The Court's handling of international law from the 1790s to the present, organised around what the editors call the Hartley principle, the practice of applying international law as part of the law of the land, edited by David Sloss, Michael Ramsey and William Dodge; Cambridge, 2011, 656 pages. Not read.
Smith, Charles Page. James Wilson: Founding Father, 1742–1798. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956.
Still the standard full-length biography (UNC Press, 1956; Enduring Edition, 2011).
Find a copy →Smith, Christopher E. John Paul Stevens: Defender of Rights in Criminal Justice. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.
Not a life but a topical study: Christopher Smith on thirty-five years of Stevens's opinions in criminal procedure, capital punishment, prisoners' rights and the right to counsel, and on how a Ford appointee from an antitrust practice became the Court's steadiest defender of the accused.
Smith, Christopher E. The Supreme Court and the Development of Law: Through the Prism of Prisoners' Rights. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Christopher Smith uses fifty years of prisoners' rights cases as a lens on the Court's decision-making, from the Black Muslim litigation that pioneered the field to the constitutional visions of Marshall, Stevens, Thomas, O'Connor and Scalia; Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 227 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Smith, Christopher E., Christina DeJong, and Michael A. McCall, eds. The Rehnquist Court and Criminal Justice. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.
Essays measuring the Rehnquist Court's criminal-justice decisions against the Warren Court's and finding the retrenchment uneven, edited by Christopher E. Smith and Christina DeJong of Michigan State with Michael McCall of San Diego State; Lexington Books, October 2011, 334 pages. Not read.
Smith, Craig Alan. Failing Justice: Charles Evans Whittaker on the Supreme Court. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005.
The one full biography, and a sympathetic, clear-eyed one.
Find a copy →Smith, Craig R. A First Amendment Profile of the Supreme Court. University of Delaware Press, 2011.
The nine justices sitting in 2011 treated one to a chapter, each measured by a record of free-expression votes and opinions, by Craig R. Smith of California State University, Long Beach; University of Delaware Press for John Cabot University Press, September 2011, 184 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Smith, J. Douglas. On Democracy's Doorstep: The Inside Story of How the Supreme Court Brought “One Person, One Vote” to the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 2014.
J. Douglas Smith on the reapportionment cases, Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims, the malapportioned legislatures that provoked them, the League of Women Voters' campaign, and the pressure around the Court from Robert Kennedy, Archibald Cox and Everett Dirksen; Hill and Wang, June 2014, 370 pages. Not read.
Smith, Jean Edward. John Marshall: Definer of a Nation. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.
The definitive single-volume life: comprehensive, authoritative, and beautifully written.
Find a copy →Smith, Joseph P., ed. History of the Republican Party in Ohio, and Memoirs of Its Representative Supporters (2 vols.). Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1898.
Cited on every Woods list, and the surprise is what it actually holds: his conversion, in two scenes, in a history compiled by the party he converted to.
Read it →Smith, Samuel Harrison & Thomas Lloyd, reporters. Trial of Samuel Chase... Before the Senate of the United States (2 vols.). Washington City: Samuel H. Smith, 1805.
The central contemporary record of the Senate trial, taken in shorthand by two reporters: the articles of impeachment, Chase's extensive answer, witness testimony, and the arguments of John Randolph, Luther Martin, and the other advocates.
Read it →Snyder, Brad, and John Q. Barrett. “Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts on Justice Jackson and Brown.” Boston College Law Review 53 (2012): 631.
The letter that surfaced after the two hearings: Rehnquist to Jackson in 1955, after the clerkship, on Brown and the Justice's part in it, published and read against the 1952 memorandum and the sworn explanations of 1971 and 1986.
Find a copy →Snyder, Brad. Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022.
The major modern biography, and a sweeping reappraisal of a justice long out of fashion.
Find a copy →Snyder, Brad. The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
The story of the Dupont Circle row house where Frankfurter, Lippmann, and the young progressives made the aging Holmes their prophet — and made his dissents the foundation of American liberalism.
Find a copy →Solberg, Rorie Spill, and Eric N. Waltenburg. The Media, the Court, and the Misrepresentation: The New Myth of the Court. Routledge, 2015.
Rorie Spill Solberg and Eric Waltenburg find two myths in the press coverage, the old cult of the robe and a newer cult of personality, and show reporting on the Court coming to resemble reporting on any other political institution; Routledge, 2015, 132 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Solomon, Burt. FDR v. the Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy. Walker & Company, 2009.
Burt Solomon's narrative of the hundred and sixty-eight days of the Court-packing fight, following the New Deal cases, Brandeis, Hughes and Owen Roberts, and the Senate opposition led by Burton K. Wheeler, and ending on the irony that the Court then moved toward Roosevelt's positions anyway; Walker, 2009, 337 pages. Not read.
Soltero, Carlos R. Latinos and American Law: Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006.
Fourteen cases from 1889 to 2001 treated one to a chapter with their social and political background, among them Hernandez v. Texas, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez and Plyler v. Doe, by Carlos Soltero, an Austin lawyer; University of Texas Press, September 2006, 239 pages. Not read.
Sommer, Udi. Supreme Court Agenda Setting: Strategic Behavior during Case Selection. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Udi Sommer of Tel Aviv on case selection as strategy, with the history of certiorari, the justices' voting at the certiorari stage, archival evidence of strategic voting, and the link between opinion authorship and the decision to grant; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 186 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Sotomayor, Sonia. My Beloved World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
Sotomayor's memoir, and the indispensable introduction to the justice and the person.
Find a copy →Sotomayor, Sonia. “A Latina Judge's Voice.” Berkeley La Raza Law Journal 13 (2002): 87.
The Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture of October 26, 2001, published the next year: the 'wise Latina' passage in its own context, eight years before the confirmation hearing that made it famous.
Find a copy →Souter, David H. Harvard Commencement Address (“The Fair Reading Model”). 2010.
Souter's intellectual testament, delivered a year after he left the Court.
Find a copy →Souter, David H. “Harvard University Commencement Address, May 27, 2010.” Harvard Gazette (2010).
The fullest statement of his method, a year after he left: why a fair reading of the text is not enough, argued through the Pentagon Papers case and Brown.
Find a copy →Sowards, Adam M. The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2009.
The only scholarly monograph on Douglas's second identity — the justice as conservation crusader, from the C&O Canal protest hike to the 'trees have standing' dissent.
Find a copy →Special Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois. “Report of Special Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois, July 31, 1969.”
The Greenberg Commission's report on Justices Solfisburg and Klingbiel and the bank stock, the investigation Stevens ran as counsel and the reason he was on anyone's list in 1970.
Find a copy →Spector, Robert M. “Legal Historian on the United States Supreme Court: Justice Horace Gray, Jr., and the Historical Method.” American Journal of Legal History 12 (1968): 181.
The foundational study of Gray's method — the scholar-justice who decided cases by exhaustive historical excavation, from legal-tender history to birthright citizenship in Wong Kim Ark.
Speiser, Lawrence. “Mr. Justice Brennan and the Bill of Rights.” Catholic University Law Review 11 (1962): 15.
The companion piece in the same issue: a survey of his first five years' record on the Bill of Rights, criminal procedure, the First Amendment and the loyalty-security cases.
Read it →Spindelman, Marc. “Kavanaugh, Rahimi, and the Effort to Legitimate Originalism.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online 173 (2025).
The most substantial scholarly treatment of Kavanaugh's jurisprudence to date — reading his Rahimi concurrence as a programmatic defense of originalism's legitimacy.
Read it →St. Clair, James E. & Linda C. Gugin. Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky: A Political Biography. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
The standard biography, and the fullest account of a much-underrated public career.
Find a copy →Staab, James Brian. The Political Thought of Justice Antonin Scalia: A Hamiltonian on the Supreme Court. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
James Staab's book-length case that Scalia's constitutional thought is Alexander Hamilton's: the same positions on interpretation, federalism, separation of powers and the reach of executive and judicial authority, and, Staab argues, the same temperament, bold, decisive and principled.
Stahr, Walter. John Jay: Founding Father. New York: Hambledon and London, 2005.
A crisp, intelligent biography that rescues John Jay from the margins of history and shows him as central to the American project — diplomat, co-author of The Federalist Papers, first Chief Justice, and Governor of New York.
Find a copy →Stahr, Walter. Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.
The readable modern life, and the natural first read.
Find a copy →Starkey, Brando Simeo. Their Accomplices Wore Robes: How the Supreme Court Chained Black America to the Bottom of a Racial Caste System. New York: Doubleday, 2025.
Brando Simeo Starkey's 688-page history of the Court and the Reconstruction Amendments, from the Civil War to now, as a record of siding with white supremacy over racial justice; Doubleday, June 2025. Not read.
Find a copy →Stebenne, David L. Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
The definitive biography, and a rich account of twentieth-century American liberalism through one career.
Read it →Steiker, Carol S., and Jordan M. Steiker. Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.
Carol and Jordan Steiker on the American choice to regulate capital punishment constitutionally rather than abolish it, from Furman and Gregg onward, and on a regulation that failed to cure arbitrariness while creating the conditions for abolition; Belknap, November 2016, 400 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Stein, Marc. Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Marc Stein's reading of six decisions, Griswold, Fanny Hill, Loving, Boutilier, Eisenstadt and Roe, with the argument that the sexual-privacy doctrine the Court built in those years was designed to favour marital, heterosexual and reproductive sex; North Carolina, 2010, 364 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Stephenson, D. Grier. The Supreme Court and the American Republic: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1981.
Slim where Martin & Goehlert is exhaustive, and annotated where it is bare: 281 pages running from general works to the justices' own writings, with the Court's institutional development covered in twenty-year intervals. Dated at 1981, but the Oxford Bibliographies survey of the field still calls it “nicely organized and helpful.”
Read it →Stephenson, Donald Grier, Jr. The Waite Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
The ABC-CLIO handbook to the Waite Court: profiles of all fifteen justices who sat between 1874 and 1888, the Court's major rulings, and a documents section.
Stern, Mark Joseph. American Justice 2019: The Roberts Court Arrives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
Mark Joseph Stern of Slate on October Term 2018, the first after Kennedy left, with Roberts in the middle of the bench; Penn Press, November 2019, 184 pages, the last of the annual six and the only one the Library of Congress catalogued under the Court's own subject heading. Not read.
Find a copy →Stern, Robert L., et al. Supreme Court Practice: For Practice in the Supreme Court of the United States. Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 2002.
The practitioners' manual: the eighth edition of Stern and his co-authors, 1,290 pages with forms from the Bureau of National Affairs in 2002, catalogued under appellate procedure. The shelf had the books on advocacy and not the rulebook. No copy found online. Not read.
Stern, Seth & Stephen Wermiel. Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
The definitive biography, drawing on decades of interviews Wermiel conducted with Brennan himself and on the justice's private case histories.
Read it →Stevens, John Paul. Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir. New York: Little, Brown, 2011.
Stevens's warm memoir of the five Chief Justices he knew — from Fred Vinson, for whom he clerked, to John Roberts — a genial insider's tour of the modern Court through the men who led it.
Read it →Stevens, John Paul. Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution. New York: Little, Brown, 2014.
The retired justice as reformer — Stevens's brief, pointed case for six constitutional amendments, on guns, the death penalty, gerrymandering, and money in politics, distilling the causes of his late dissents into proposals.
Read it →Stevens, John Paul. The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years. New York: Little, Brown, 2019.
Stevens's own memoir, written in his late nineties and published the year he died — an unhurried, term-by-term walk through his life and cases from the inside.
Find a copy →Stewart, David O. Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.
The one duty the Constitution reserves for the Chief Justice alone: in 1868 Chase presided over the Senate trial of President Andrew Johnson, and Stewart's fast, fair-minded account is the best popular narrative of it.
Find a copy →Stewart, Potter. “Or of the Press.” Hastings Law Journal 26 (1975): 631.
Stewart's famous Yale address — the argument that the Press Clause is a structural protection for the institutional press, not a redundancy of free speech.
Read it →Stone, Geoffrey R. “Understanding Supreme Court Confirmations.” Supreme Court Review 2010: 381–467.
Eighty-seven pages of the Supreme Court Review asking how the confirmation process changed and how much of the change is the Bork fight's long shadow — the fullest single treatment of the modern process, from inside the University of Chicago Law School.
Stone, Geoffrey R., and David A. Strauss. Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
The compact modern defense of the Warren Court's legacy — two Chicago scholars restating what the revolution accomplished, case by case, for a generation that takes it for granted or wants it undone.
Find a copy →Stone, Harlan Fiske. Law and Its Administration. New York: Columbia University Press, 1915.
The dean's book: 256 pages from the Columbia University Press in 1915, written while he ran the law school and a decade before Coolidge sent him to Washington, on the law and the machinery that administers it.
Read it →Story, Joseph. "Sketch of the character of [Thomas] Todd." In The Miscellaneous Writings of Joseph Story (1852): 817–819.
Story's warm memorial to a colleague of nineteen years — the best contemporary character evidence we have, praising Todd's land-law mastery and his self-command in yielding first impressions to better argument.
Read it →Story, Joseph. A Discourse upon the Life, Character, and Services of the Honorable John Marshall, LL.D., Chief Justice of the United States of America. Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1835.
Story's eulogy of Marshall, pronounced in Boston on 15 October 1835 at the request of the Suffolk Bar and printed by James Munroe in seventy-four pages: 'His life speaks its own best eulogy.'
Read it →Story, Joseph. A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States: Containing a Brief Commentary on Every Clause. Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb, 1840.
The Commentaries brought down to a single volume 'designed for the use of school libraries and general readers', 372 pages from Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb of Boston in 1840, six years after the still shorter Constitutional Class Book: the sitting Justice explaining every clause to the schoolroom.
Read it →Story, Joseph. Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (3 vols.). Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1833.
The most influential constitutional treatise of the nineteenth century, written at night while its author sat on the Court and ran Harvard Law School by day.
Find a copy →Story, William Wetmore, ed. Life and Letters of Joseph Story (2 vols.; with Miscellaneous Writings, 1852). Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851.
William Wetmore Story's two-volume life of his father, 1851, built from Joseph Story's own letters and the son's connecting narrative, with the Miscellaneous Writings of 1852 as companion: the boarding-house Court, the colleagues, and the deaths that broke the circle, Livingston's in March 1823 among them. Public domain at the Internet Archive.
Read it →Strauss, Robert. John Marshall: The Final Founder, a Biography and Thoughts on the Issues of American History He Inspired. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2021.
Robert Strauss's popular life of 2021, whose argument is in its title: that Marshall belongs with Washington and Franklin in the first rank of the founders, and that the founding should be dated not to the Constitution but to the peaceful transfer of power in 1801 and what Marshall then made of a Court sitting in a basement room of the Capitol.
Find a copy →Streichler, Stuart. Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
The 'crossroads' of the subtitle is the argument: Curtis embodied a legalist middle constitutionalism that the 1850s destroyed, and his career is the best single lens on what was lost.
Find a copy →Strickland, Stephen Parks, ed. Hugo Black and the Supreme Court: A Symposium. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.
The symposium volume of 1967, thirty years into the tenure and four before its end: xxix and 365 pages from Bobbs-Merrill with a portrait, sixty-six pages of notes, and the Library of Congress heading 'Addresses, essays, lectures.'
Read it →Strong, William. Two Lectures upon the Relations of Civil Law to Church Polity, Discipline, and Property. New York: Dodd & Mead, 1875.
Strong's own published lectures on church and state — the key primary source for the justice who, while sitting on the Court, presided over the movement to write Christianity into the Constitution.
Find a copy →Strub, Whitney. Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013.
Whitney Strub on Samuel Roth's prosecution and on the case that forced the Court to fix obscenity's place under the First Amendment, with Brennan's opinion read as liberalising and restricting at the same time; Kansas, September 2013, 278 pages, in the Landmark Law Cases series. Not read.
Strum, Philippa. Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993.
Strum's second Brandeis book — not a retelling of the life but a distillation of the political and economic thought: the curse of bigness, industrial democracy, and the citizen's obligation to participate.
Find a copy →Strum, Philippa. Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
The standard scholarly biography before Urofsky's, and still the sharpest on Brandeis the reformer-jurist — Strum is especially good on how the crusading 'People's Lawyer' translated his progressivism into constitutional method.
Read it →Suitts, Steve. Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2005.
A deeply researched account of the Alabama origins by a Southern civil-rights scholar — the fullest treatment of how the world of the rural New South produced the justice, Klan chapter and all.
Sutherland, George. Constitutional Power and World Affairs. New York: Columbia University Press, 1919.
The book before the opinion: Sutherland, out of the Senate and three years from the Court, on the national government's power over foreign affairs, the argument he would write into Curtiss-Wright as a Justice in 1936; 200 pages from the Columbia University Press, 1919.
Read it →Sweet, Martin J. Merely Judgment: Ignoring, Evading, and Trumping the Supreme Court. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010.
Martin J. Sweet on the decisions that were never carried out, with case studies of affirmative action in government contracting, legislative vetoes, flag burning, hate speech and school prayer, and a comparison of how Philadelphia, Portland and Miami responded to City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson; Virginia, November 2010, 240 pages, in the Constitutionalism and Democracy series. Not read.
Find a copy →Swisher, Carl B. The Taney Period, 1836–64 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 5). New York: Macmillan, 1974.
The Holmes Devise volume for the Taney Court — a thousand pages of institutional history covering the Court from 1836 to 1864.
Read it →Swisher, Carl Brent. Roger B. Taney. New York: Macmillan, 1935.
The whole man: the Calvert County Catholic gentry, the Frederick practice, the Jackson years at the Attorney Generalship and the Treasury, twenty-eight years in the center chair, and the catastrophe of 1857.
Read it →Swisher, Carl Brent. Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1930.
The classic biography, and still the fullest account of Field as a working judge — the circuit-riding, the opinions, the feuds, the marathon tenure.
Read it →Taft, William Howard. Liberty under Law: An Interpretation of the Principles of Our Constitutional Government. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922.
The Chief Justice's short creed, sixty-four pages published by Yale for the University of Rochester in 1922, a year into the chief justiceship: the Constitution as a system of liberty under law, catalogued under civil rights and constitutional law.
Read it →Taft, William Howard. Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1916.
Taft's own book on the presidency, written between his two great offices — the classic statement of the constitutionally modest 'stewardship' view of executive power, composed in pointed answer to Theodore Roosevelt's expansive one.
Read it →Taft, William Howard. Popular Government: Its Essence, Its Permanence and Its Perils. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913.
The first book of the Yale years, the lectures the ex-President gave in 1913 as he settled into New Haven: 308 pages from the Yale University Press on what popular government is and what threatens it, from a man who had just lost the 1912 election.
Read it →Taft, William Howard. The Anti-trust Act and the Supreme Court. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1914.
Taft on the Sherman Act as the Court had read it, 152 pages from Harper & Brothers in 1914, written between the presidency and the chief justiceship; the Library of Congress catalogs it under the Court and antitrust law.
Read it →Tanenhaus, David S., ed. Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008.
About eleven hundred peer-reviewed articles on the law, the processes that generate it and the Court's history, with overview essays, a glossary, a thematic outline, documents and indexes, edited by David S. Tanenhaus of the UNLV law school with Kay P. Kindred, Felice Batlan, Alfred L. Brophy and Mark A. Graber; Macmillan Reference USA, Detroit, 2008, five volumes. Not read.
Tang, Aaron. Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence Is Destroying the Court, and How We Can Fix It. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
Aaron Tang of UC Davis argues the Court's disease is certainty rather than partisanship and prescribes a least-harm principle for its hardest cases; Yale, 2023, 328 pages. Not read.
Tate, C. Neal. Personal Attribute Models. American Political Science Review 75, no. 2 (1981): 355–367.
The high-water mark of the personal-attributes literature: seven variables — party, appointing president, prelaw education, elective office, region, judicial experience and prosecutorial experience, two of them used in only one of the two models — accounting for 70 to 90 per cent of the variance in postwar justices’ votes in split civil-liberties and economics cases.
Find a copy →Taylor, Flavia M. "The Politician and Judicial Career of Henry Baldwin." Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 24 (1941).
The fullest scholarly article ever devoted to Baldwin — from the historical magazine of the city he dominated as lawyer, ironmaster, and Jackson organizer.
Taylor, Michael H. James Wilson: The Anxious Founder. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023.
Find a copy →Taylor, Telford. The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
The standard insider history of the trial Jackson led, by his successor as chief counsel — unsparing about Jackson's disastrous cross-examination of Göring and generous about the achievement anyway.
Read it →Tenhundfeld, Mark J. State of Segregation: America's Freedom Rights Struggles as Told by Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2026.
Alabama's civil-rights history told through thirty-two Supreme Court cases from the state, Giles v. Harris to Reynolds v. Sims, Powell and Norris v. Alabama, Browder v. Gayle and Gomillion, in seven topical parts, by Mark Tenhundfeld, a Mobile lawyer turned teacher; Alabama, April 2026, 318 pages. Not read.
Thai, Joseph T. “The Law Clerk Who Wrote Rasul v. Bush: John Paul Stevens's Influence from World War II to the War on Terror.” Virginia Law Review 92 (2006): 501.
The Ahrens-to-Rasul loop: the 1948 clerk's work on Justice Rutledge's dissent in Ahrens v. Clark, and the 2004 opinion for the Court that reached the Guantanamo detainees on the same distinction between jurisdiction and venue, by a former Stevens clerk.
Read it →Thapar, Amul. The People's Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories That Define Him. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2023.
Find a copy →“The Jefferson–Johnson Correspondence, 1822–1823.” Founders Online, National Archives.
The great primary-source seam: the retired Jefferson urging Johnson to revive seriatim opinions and break Marshall's unanimity, and Johnson's replies candidly describing the Court's internal practice — including how opinions really got assigned and swallowed.
Read it →The Papers of Justice Tom C. Clark — Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin (collection guide). Austin: Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas School of Law, 1949–1977.
The Court years: 524 linear feet, 869 boxes, given by his widow in 1977, with case files, bench memoranda, docket sheets, briefs and slip opinions for the eighteen terms, fifty-six feet of correspondence and fifty-nine of speeches and travel.
Find a copy →“The Unjust Judge: A Memorial of Roger Brooke Taney.” Anonymous pamphlet. New York: Baker & Godwin, 1865.
Published within months of his death: a pamphlet-length assassination of the late Chief Justice's character, so venomous that identifying its author became a scholarly parlor game — Walker Lewis's "The Unjust Judge: Who Wrote It?"
Thomas, Andrew Peyton. Clarence Thomas: A Biography. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001.
The first comprehensive biography — a sympathetic full-length life covering the Georgia childhood, the seminary, Yale, the EEOC, and the confirmation.
Read it →Thomas, Clarence. My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir. New York: Harper, 2007.
Thomas's own account of his life, and an indispensable and moving counterpart to the outside studies.
Find a copy →Thomas, Evan. First: Sandra Day O'Connor. New York: Random House, 2019.
The definitive biography, and a superb one.
Find a copy →Thomas, Helen Shirley. Felix Frankfurter: Scholar on the Bench. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960.
An early academic study of Frankfurter's jurisprudence, published while he still sat — the first serious attempt to systematize his philosophy of self-limitation and deference to the elected branches.
Read it →Thomas, William G., III. A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020.
The story of the Queen, Butler, and Bell families, who sued for their freedom in Maryland and Washington courts for three generations.
Find a copy →Thurgood Marshall Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1949-1991.
A career's paper in 579 containers: 173,700 items, 231.6 linear feet, 1949 to 1991 with the bulk from 1961.
Read it →Timberlake, Richard H. Constitutional Money: A Review of the Supreme Court's Monetary Decisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Nine monetary decisions from McCulloch v. Maryland to the Gold Clause Cases, read by the economist Richard Timberlake as misjudgments under political pressure, with his own case for a gold standard in the closing chapter; Cambridge, April 2013, 247 pages. Not read.
Tobias, Carl. “Warren Burger and the Administration of Justice.” Villanova Law Review 41 (1996): 505.
The case that his real legacy is administrative: the institutions he built and the reforms he pushed for the federal courts, weighed against a jurisprudence that neither wing would claim.
Read it →Tom C. Clark Papers — Harry S. Truman Presidential Library (finding aid). Independence, Missouri: Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, 1941–1971.
The Justice Department half of the papers: fifty-three feet of correspondence, case files, speeches and appointment calendars from the Criminal Division and the Attorney General's office, 1941 to 1949, with the Supreme Court nomination file and social correspondence running to 1971.
Find a copy →Tomlins, Christopher, ed. The United States Supreme Court: The Pursuit of Justice. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
A one-volume history developed with the American Bar Foundation and published by Houghton Mifflin in 2005, edited by Christopher Tomlins, catalogued under the Court's history and constitutional history. No copy found online. Not read.
Toobin, Jeffrey. The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
Narrative journalism on the Court from the mid-Rehnquist years to Alito's arrival, built on not-for-attribution interviews with the justices and more than seventy-five law clerks.
Read it →Toobin, Jeffrey. The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court. New York: Doubleday, 2012.
Jeffrey Toobin's gripping narrative of the collision between the Obama White House and the Roberts Court — Citizens United, the health-care case, and the frosty relationship between the president and the Chief who fumbled his inaugural oath and then, improbably, saved his signature law.
Read it →Toth, Michael C. Founding Federalist: The Life of Oliver Ellsworth. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011.
The most accessible modern biography — from Windsor and Princeton through the Connecticut Compromise, the "Landholder" ratification essays, the drafting of the Judiciary Act of 1789, the Chief Justiceship, and the peace mission to Napoleon's France.
Find a copy →Treanor, William Michael. “The Jurisprudence of Justice Stevens.” Fordham Law Review 74 (2006): 1557.
The introduction to Fordham's thirtieth-anniversary symposium, which prints President Ford's letter of September 21, 2005 saying he was prepared to let history's judgment of his presidency rest on the nomination.
Read it →Tribe, Laurence H. God Save This Honorable Court: How the Choice of Supreme Court Justices Shapes Our History. New York: Random House, 1985.
Made in 1985, the case that the Senate owes a president no deference on judicial philosophy — by the Harvard professor who testified against Bork and later acknowledged unattributed borrowing from Henry Abraham.
Tribe, Laurence, and Joshua Matz. Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution. New York: Henry Holt, 2014.
The constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz on the Roberts Court's jurisprudence — a nuanced argument that it is less predictable, and less monolithically conservative, than either side believes.
Read it →“Tributes to Justice Whittaker.” Texas Law Review 40 (1962): 742.
The farewell on his retirement, from Friedman and Israel's own bibliography.
Trimble, Bruce R. Chief Justice Waite: Defender of the Public Interest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1938.
The only other full-length Waite biography — the pre-Magrath standard life, framed around Munn v. Illinois and Waite's deference to public regulation.
Tucker, David M. “Justice Horace Harmon Lurton: The Shaping of a National Progressive.” American Journal of Legal History 13 (1969): 223–232.
The one scholarly article ever dedicated to Lurton — the teenage Confederate cavalryman, imprisoned twice, who rose to the Supreme Court appointed by a Republican president.
Tushnet, Mark V. In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
Mark Tushnet's scholarly account of law and politics on the Roberts Court — the academic counterpart to the journalists' narratives, mapping the blocs, the doctrinal stakes, and the Chief's institutional caution.
Read it →Tushnet, Mark V. Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
The definitive study of Marshall's work as a lawyer — the long campaign that culminated in Brown.
Read it →Tushnet, Mark V. Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961–1991. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
The companion to Making Civil Rights Law, and the essential study of Marshall the justice — the twenty-four years on the Court, the alliance with Brennan, and the great dissents on race, poverty, and the death penalty as the Court moved right around him.
Read it →Tushnet, Mark V. The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 11). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
The Holmes Devise volume on Hughes's chief justiceship — the fullest scholarly account of the Court that faced down FDR, absorbed the constitutional revolution of 1937, and invented modern rights jurisprudence in footnote four.
Find a copy →Tushnet, Mark V. The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
The scholarly foundation for Making Civil Rights Law — a close study of how the NAACP, under Houston and then Marshall, built the campaign against school segregation from the ground up, choosing plaintiffs, courts, and arguments with strategic patience across a quarter-century.
Read it →Tushnet, Mark V. The Warren Court in Historical and Political Perspective. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
Tushnet, Mark V., ed. Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminiscences. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001.
The essential documentary reader — Marshall across the whole life in his own words: NAACP arguments, the candid oral history he gave Columbia, speeches, and major opinions, gathered and framed by his biographer.
Read it →Tushnet, Mark, ed. I Dissent: Great Opposing Opinions in Landmark Supreme Court Cases. Beacon Press, 2008.
Thirteen dissents from Marbury v. Madison to Lawrence v. Texas, each with Mark Tushnet's commentary and a consideration of how the law would have developed had the dissent carried the day, on the premise that decisions are political statements by intelligent partisans; Beacon Press, June 2008, 256 pages. Not read.
Tushnet, Mark, ed. The Warren Court in Historical and Political Perspective. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
The Warren Court set in its history and politics, 220 pages of essays from the University Press of Virginia in 1993 edited by Mark Tushnet. One of the books Jim owns that had no shelf until now. No copy found online. Not read.
Tushnet, Mark. A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Mark Tushnet's argument that the Rehnquist Court's divisions tracked a split inside the Republican party between its economic and its social conservatives; W. W. Norton, 2005, 384 pages, the paperback of which is the Library's 2006 record. Not read.
Tushnet, Mark. Taking Back the Constitution: Activist Judges and the Next Age of American Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020.
Mark Tushnet traces constitutional development from New Deal liberalism through the Reagan era to the possible futures after 2016, and argues for popular constitutionalism in place of judicial supremacy; Yale, July 2020, 320 pages. Not read.
Tushnet, Mark. Who Am I to Judge? Judicial Craft versus Constitutional Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025.
Mark Tushnet's short case that good judgment, not a theory of interpretation, is what a judge needs, and that the Court's best periods had no theory at all; Yale, February 2025, 192 pages. Not read.
Tushnet, Mark. “Willis Van Devanter: The Person.” Journal of Supreme Court History 45 (2020).
The only modern biographical study of Van Devanter — the Wyoming railroad lawyer whose 'pen paralysis' left almost no written legacy, reconstructed from his letters.
Find a copy →Tyler, Samuel. Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D., Chief Justice of the United States. Baltimore: John Murphy, 1872.
The authorized answer to The Unjust Judge, built around Taney's own autobiographical fragment — the only sustained account of his early life in his own voice, with the Gruber defense preserved in full.
Find a copy →Ulmer, S. Sidney. Social Background as an Indicator. American Journal of Political Science 17, no. 3 (1973): 622–630.
Find a copy →Unger, Harlow Giles. John Marshall: The Chief Justice Who Saved the Nation. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016.
Read it →United States Congress. Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Memorial Tributes in the Congress of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2017.
The official memorial volume, Senate Document 114-12, printed by order of S. Res.
Read it →United States Congress. Thurgood Marshall, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: Memorial Tributes in the Congress of the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1994.
Congress's memorial volume: 304 pages from the Government Printing Office in 1994, House Document 103-244, with a portrait, collecting the tributes spoken in both houses after Marshall's death in January 1993.
United States House of Representatives, Committee on Natural Resources. H. Res. 279, “Insular Cases Resolution”: Legislative Hearing before the Committee on Natural Resources, House of Representatives, 117th Congress, 1st Session, May 12, 2021. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2021.
The House Natural Resources Committee's May 2021 hearing on a resolution declaring the Insular Cases and the territorial incorporation doctrine contrary to the Constitution, with officials from American Samoa and Guam, Rose Cuison-Villazor, Daniel Immerwahr and Neil Weare as witnesses; 74 pages, free at govinfo.
Read it →United States House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. Building Confidence in the Supreme Court through Ethics and Recusal Reforms: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 117th Congress, 2nd Session, April 27, 2022. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2022.
The House Judiciary subcommittee's April 2022 hearing on an ethics code and recusal rules for the Court, with Gabe Roth of Fix the Court, Donald Sherman of CREW, Mark Paoletta and Stephen Gillers of NYU as witnesses; 150 pages, free at govinfo.
Read it →United States House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. Maintaining Judicial Independence and the Rule of Law: Examining the Causes and Consequences of Court Capture: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 116th Congress, 2nd Session, September 22, 2020. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2022.
The House Judiciary subcommittee's September 2020 hearing on what it called court capture, with Senator Whitehouse, Tom Ginsburg of Chicago, Ilya Shapiro of Cato, the retired judge Nancy Gertner and Amanda Hollis-Brusky of Pomona as witnesses; 281 pages, printed in 2022 and free at govinfo.
Read it →United States House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 117th Congress, 1st Session, February 18, 2021. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2022.
The House Judiciary subcommittee's February 2021 hearing on the shadow docket, the first congressional hearing on the subject, with Stephen Vladeck, Amir Ali, Michael Morley and the District of Columbia's solicitor general Loren AliKhan as witnesses; 502 pages with the submissions, printed in 2022 and free at govinfo.
Read it →United States House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. Undue Influence: Operation Higher Court and Politicking at SCOTUS: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 117th Congress, 2nd Session, December 8, 2022. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2023.
The House Judiciary Committee's December 2022 hearing on Operation Higher Court, the campaign to cultivate justices socially, with the Reverend Robert Schenck, Caroline Fredrickson, Mark Paoletta and Donald Sherman as witnesses; 236 pages, printed in 2023 and free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Access to the Court: Televising the Supreme Court: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 112th Congress, 1st Session, December 6, 2011. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012.
The Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing of 6 December 2011 on the Durbin and Grassley Cameras in the Courtroom Act, with former Senator Arlen Specter, Tom Goldstein, Chief Justice Mark Cady of the Iowa Supreme Court, Chief Judge J. Anthony Scirica of the Third Circuit and Maureen Mahoney testifying; Government Printing Office, 2012, 97 pages, free at govinfo. Not read.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Barriers to Justice and Accountability: How the Supreme Court's Recent Rulings Will Affect Corporate Behavior: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 112th Congress, 1st Session, June 29, 2011. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012.
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing of 29 June 2011 on what the Court's recent decisions would mean for corporate behaviour, with Betty Dukes, the named plaintiff in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, Melissa Hart of Colorado, James D. Cox of Duke, Robert Alt of the Heritage Foundation and Andrew Pincus testifying; Government Printing Office, 2012, 166 pages, free at govinfo. Not read.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Hon. Amy Coney Barrett to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 116th Congress, 2nd Session, October 12-15, 2020. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2024.
The printed record of the four October 2020 days, published by the Government Publishing Office in 2024 as S. Hrg.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Hon. Brett M. Kavanaugh to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 115th Congress, 2nd Session, September 4, 5, 6, 7, and 27, 2018. Washington: Government Printing Office, 2020.
The printed record, published in 2020: the four September days and the September 27 session with Dr. Ford, from which the chapter's quotations are taken.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 117th Congress, 2nd Session, March 21, 22, 23, and 24, 2022. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2023.
The printed record of the four March 2022 days, published by the Government Publishing Office in 2023 as S. Hrg.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Hon. Neil M. Gorsuch to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 115th Congress, 1st Session, March 20, 21, 22, and 23, 2017. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2018.
The printed record of the four March 2017 days, published by the Government Publishing Office in 2018 as S. Hrg.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 111th Congress, 1st Session, July 13-16, 2009. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010.
The confirmation hearing itself, 13 to 16 July 2009, 1,388 pages, free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Confirmation Hearing on the Nomination of Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 109th Congress, 2nd Session, January 9-13, 2006. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2006.
The confirmation hearing itself, 9 to 13 January 2006, 1,598 pages, free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, on the Nomination of William J. Brennan, Jr., to be an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 85th Congress, 1st Session. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1957.
The confirmation hearing, with Senator McCarthy's statement that 'I believe that Justice Brennan has demonstrated an underlying hostility to congressional attempts to expose the Communist conspiracy,' Brennan's answer that 'I cannot think of a more vital function of the Congress than the investigatory function of its committees,' and, on whether a Catholic could sit, that 'what shall control me is the oath that I took to support the Constitution and laws of the United States.'
United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Nomination of Byron R. White, of Colorado, to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 87th Congress, 2nd Session, April 11, 1962. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1962.
The whole hearing, 10:30 to 12:05 on April 11, 1962, with the Senate confirming him the same day: two Colorado senators, a congressman, the ABA's Bernard Segal, and the nominee, who told Senator Long that 'the judicial power is exercised by deciding cases.'
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Nomination of David H. Souter to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 101st Congress, 2nd Session, September 13-19, 1990. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1990.
The hearings on the nominee with no paper trail, and the record that includes the McGuigan memorandum's 'home run' report as submitted.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Nomination of John Marshall Harlan: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 84th Congress, 1st Session, on Nomination of John Marshall Harlan, of New York, to be Associate Justice of Supreme Court of United States, February 24 and 25, 1955. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1955.
The confirmation hearings of February 24 and 25, 1955, 182 pages, the first at which a nominee was made to answer a committee's questions as a matter of course: the isolationists on world government and Chairman Eastland, indirectly, on Brown, to whom the nominee put back the question whether that was what he was being asked.
United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Nomination of Judge Antonin Scalia to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 99th Congress, 2nd Session, August 5 and 6, 1986. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1987.
Two days in August 1986, in the shadow of the Rehnquist fight the same summer, and a 98-0 vote: the hearing at which almost nothing was asked and the biographical record (Georgetown first in class, the marriage, Cleveland) was entered.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Nomination of Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist to be Chief Justice of the United States: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 99th Congress, 2nd Session, July 29, 30, 31, and August 1, 1986. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1986.
The four days of 1986: the Jackson memorandum again, the Phoenix poll-watching allegations, the deed covenants, and the 65-33 vote that followed.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Nominations of William H. Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell, Jr.: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 92nd Congress, 1st Session, November 3, 4, 8, 9, and 10, 1971. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1971.
The Senate Judiciary Committee's printed record of the joint hearings on Nixon's two October 1971 nominees, five days in November, with the 1952 'Random Thought on the Segregation Cases' memorandum reprinted in it; free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Supreme Court Ethics Reform: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 118th Congress, 1st Session, May 2, 2023. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2025.
The Senate Judiciary Committee's May 2023 hearing on a binding ethics code for the Court, Durbin presiding, with Jeremy Fogel, Kedric Payne and Amanda Frost for reform and Michael Mukasey and Thomas Dupree against; printed by GPO in 2025 as S. Hrg. 118-35, and free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Supreme Court Fact-Finding and the Distortion of American Democracy: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 117th Congress, 1st Session, April 27, 2021. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2026.
The Senate Judiciary subcommittee's April 2021 hearing on how the Court finds facts, Allison Orr Larsen's work on factual precedents its occasion, with Thomas Fisher, Theodore Shaw, Ilya Shapiro and Paul Smith as the other witnesses; printed by GPO in 2026 as S. Hrg. 117-781, 101 pages, and free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Texas's Unconstitutional Abortion Ban and the Role of the Shadow Docket: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 117th Congress, 1st Session, September 29, 2021. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2024.
The Senate Judiciary Committee's September 2021 hearing on Texas S.B. 8 and the order that let it stand, Durbin presiding, with Stephen Vladeck among the witnesses; printed by GPO in 2024 as S. Hrg. 117-851, and free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. The Nomination of Elena Kagan to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 111th Congress, 2nd Session, June 28-30 and July 1, 2010. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010.
The confirmation hearing itself, 28 June to 1 July 2010, free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. What Is Wrong with the Supreme Court: The Big-Money Assault on Our Judiciary: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 117th Congress, 1st Session, March 10, 2021. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2025.
The Senate Judiciary subcommittee's March 2021 hearing on anonymous money in nominations, confirmation campaigns and amicus briefs, Whitehouse presiding, with Lisa Graves, Michael Klarman, Benjamin Jealous, Scott Walter and Jonathan Adler as witnesses; printed by GPO in 2025 as S. Hrg. 117-687, and free at govinfo.
Read it →United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. With Prejudice: Supreme Court Activism and Possible Solutions: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights, and Federal Courts of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 114th Congress, 1st Session, July 22, 2015. Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 2025.
The Senate Judiciary subcommittee's July 2015 hearing on judicial activism after King v. Burwell and Obergefell, Cruz presiding, with John Eastman, Neil Siegel and Ed Whelan as witnesses; printed by GPO ten years later as S. Hrg. 114-888, and free at govinfo.
Read it →United States. Supreme Court. In Memoriam: Samuel Blatchford — Proceedings of the Bar and Bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, October 13, 1893.
Sixty pages, free, and the only sustained contemporary account of Blatchford there is — which makes it, by default, the closest thing he has to a biography.
Read it →United States. Supreme Court. In Memoriam: Samuel Blatchford, LL.D. — Appendix, 150 U.S. 707 (1893).
Use this for the citation and the pamphlet for the detail.
Read it →United States. Supreme Court. In Memoriam: William Burnham Woods, LL.D. — Appendix, 123 U.S. 761 (1887).
The memorial session of Monday, 7 November 1887, printed as an appendix to volume 123 of the United States Reports.
Read it →Unsigned. "Hon. James M. Wayne." United States Monthly Law Magazine 5, no. 3 (1852): 382–399.
A long profile from the height of his mid-career, in the antebellum legal press's florid style.
Unsigned; Francis R. Jones. "Robert C. Grier" (U.S. Monthly Law Journal, 1852) & "Robert Cooper Grier" (Green Bag 16, 1904).
Two period portraits, as the FJC's bibliography lists them: the 1852 profile from the same magazine series that covered Wayne and Catron on earlier pages — the antebellum bar surveying the sitting Court, justice by justice — and the Green Bag's retrospective a generation later.
Unsigned; long attributed to Joseph Story. "Memoir of Judge Trimble." American Jurist, and Law Magazine 1, no. 1 (1829): 149–157.
Published months after his death in the very first issue of the young republic's leading law magazine — a measure, in itself, of how seriously the profession took the loss.
Read it →Urofsky, Melvin I. A Conflict of Rights: The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action. New York: Scribner, 1991.
Urofsky, Melvin I. Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court’s History and the Nation’s Constitutional Dialogue. New York: Pantheon Books, 2015.
Traces dissent from an era when open disagreement was discouraged to a Court where separate opinions abound, arguing that yesterday's dissent — on speech, race, liberty — often becomes today's law.
Find a copy →Urofsky, Melvin I. Division and Discord: The Supreme Court under Stone and Vinson, 1941–1953. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
The Stone and Vinson years taken on their own terms, internment through the Rosenbergs, in the South Carolina chief-justiceships series; Powe's review called it 'a book we all should have in our libraries.'
Urofsky, Melvin I. Felix Frankfurter: Judicial Restraint and Individual Liberties. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
A compact, balanced assessment of the central puzzle: how the fiery civil-libertarian of the 1920s became the bench's great apostle of deference.
Read it →Urofsky, Melvin I. Louis D. Brandeis and the Progressive Tradition. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.
Urofsky's earlier, shorter study — the concise argument for Brandeis as the pivotal figure of American progressivism, written a generation before his monumental 2009 life.
Read it →Urofsky, Melvin I. Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009.
The definitive modern biography — nearly a thousand pages, three decades in the making, and the product of the leading Brandeis scholar of his generation.
Find a copy →Urofsky, Melvin I. Supreme Decisions: Great Constitutional Cases and Their Impact. Westview Press, 2012.
Twenty-four constitutional cases treated for student readers, each with the background, the decision and what followed, by Melvin Urofsky; Westview Press, 2012, two volumes of 256 and 272 pages divided at 1896, with a combined volume of 448. Not read.
Find a copy →Urofsky, Melvin I., and David W. Levy, eds. Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (5 vols.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1971.
The definitive edition of the correspondence (five volumes, 1971–1978), the documentary foundation for all modern Brandeis scholarship — and the place to watch the lawyer, Zionist, and justice think and organize across sixty years.
Read it →Urofsky, Melvin I., and David W. Levy, eds. “Half Brother, Half Son”: The Letters of Louis D. Brandeis to Felix Frankfurter. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Brandeis's letters to Frankfurter, one side of the correspondence, edited by Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy for the University of Oklahoma Press in 1991, with references and index.
Read it →Urofsky, Melvin I., and Philip E. Urofsky, eds. The Douglas Letters: Selections from the Private Papers of Justice William O. Douglas. Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1987.
Selections from the vast private papers — Douglas in correspondence with presidents, colleagues, and admirers, the candid record behind the public performances.
Read it →Urofsky, Melvin I., ed. Biographical Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court: The Lives and Legal Philosophies of the Justices. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006.
Alphabetical entries covering every justice past and present, each giving the appointment facts and then an essay on that justice's opinions and legal philosophy; Roberts and Alito added to a 1994 predecessor.
Read it →Urofsky, Melvin I., ed. The Public Debate over Controversial Supreme Court Decisions. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006.
More than forty cases from McCulloch v. Maryland to Lawrence v. Texas, each with an introductory essay and then the newspaper accounts, polls, letters to the justices and politicians' statements that followed it, edited by Melvin Urofsky for school and library readers; CQ Press, November 2005, 432 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Van Ee, Daun. “Harry A. Blackmun, Justice: Supreme Court Justice's Papers Opened for Research.” Library of Congress Information Bulletin (2004).
The Library's own announcement of the opening, March 4, 2004, five years to the day after his death: 1,585 containers, 630 linear feet, the case files, correspondence, drafts, and the videotaped interviews.
Read it →VanBurkleo, Sandra F. “In Defense of ‘Public Reason’: Supreme Court Justice William Johnson.” Journal of Supreme Court History 32, no. 2 (2007): 116–130.
The major modern reinterpretation: Johnson's separate opinions weren't proto-modern dissents but an older, Anti-Federalist conviction that judges must speak for themselves rather than hide behind one institutional voice.
Read it →Virelli, Louis J., III. Disqualifying the High Court: Supreme Court Recusal and the Constitution. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2016.
Louis Virelli of Stetson treats recusal as a constitutional question and argues that separation of powers bars Congress from regulating it, leaving it to each justice within due process and First Amendment limits; Kansas, June 2016, 296 pages. Not read.
Vladeck, Stephen I. Putting the Shadow Docket in Perspective. Harvard Law and Policy Review 17, no. 2 (2023): 289–299.
Eleven pages restating the case against the practice, in the Harvard Law and Policy Review's “Reaching the Merits” issue of 2023, opening on the first Monday of October Term 2022 and crediting Will Baude with the phrase. Free from the journal; opening and citation read, not the whole.
Find a copy →Vladeck, Stephen I. The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. New York: Basic Books, 2023.
The case against the Court's unsigned, unexplained emergency orders — travel ban, COVID rules, election cases — and their sharp rise after 2017, made by a federal courts scholar.
Find a copy →Vladeck, Stephen I. The Solicitor General and the Shadow Docket. Harvard Law Review 133 (2019): 123–163.
The Solicitor General's turn to emergency relief, forty-one pages in the Harvard Law Review in 2019: roughly eight stay applications across the sixteen combined Bush and Obama years against at least twenty-one in the first thirty-two months of the first Trump administration, ten of them in October Term 2018. Free from the Harvard Law Review; the counts were taken from the essay's own text.
Read it →Wagman, Robert J. The Supreme Court: A Citizen’s Guide. New York: Pharos Books, 1993.
Written for the general reader, a guide pairing a narrative history of the Court as an institution with biographical treatment of the justices.
Read it →Waldman, Michael. The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center on the 2021 term, Dobbs, Bruen and West Virginia v. EPA together, and on what a Court at odds with the public might be made to do; Simon & Schuster, June 2023, 400 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Wallace, Harry L. “Mr. Justice Minton: Hoosier Justice on the Supreme Court.” Indiana Law Journal 34 (1959): 145.
Friedman and Israel print the author as Henry; the journal prints Harry.
Read it →Waltman, Jerold. Church and State in the Roberts Court: Christian Conservatism and Social Change in Ten Cases, 2005-2018. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019.
The late Jerold Waltman of Baylor, who edited the Journal of Church and State, on ten Roberts Court religion cases read against four changes in the religious landscape: growing diversity, rising secularism, the political weight of LGBTQ groups, and the conservative Christian response; McFarland, 2019, 186 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Ward, Artemus, and David L. Weiden. Sorcerers' Apprentices: 100 Years of Law Clerks at the United States Supreme Court. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Artemus Ward and David Weiden asking whether the clerks are research assistants or de facto decision-makers, from archival sources and interviews with a hundred and fifty former clerks, and ending in proposals for reform; New York University Press, 2006, 337 pages. Not read.
Ward, Artemus, Christopher Brough, and Robert Arnold. Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Supreme Court. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
More than seven hundred cross-referenced entries on the justices, the cases, the issues and the Court's procedures, with a chronology and a bibliography, by Artemus Ward of Northern Illinois with Christopher Brough and Robert Arnold; Rowman & Littlefield, August 2015, 627 pages. Not read.
Warner, Ezra J. Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.
The standard biographical register of the Union army: all 583 men who reached the rank of general, with photographs and compact factual entries.
Read it →Warner, Hoyt Landon. The Life of Mr. Justice Clarke: A Testament to the Power of Liberal Dissent in America. Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1959.
The one full biography, and a sympathetic one.
Read it →Warren, Charles. The Supreme Court in United States History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1922.
The three-volume history that won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, carrying the Court from 1789 to 1918 and long foundational for American legal historians.
Read it →Warren, Earl, and others. “Mr. Justice Brennan.” Harvard Law Review 80 (1966): 1.
The tributes that opened the November 1966 number on his tenth anniversary, at pages 1 to 22: the Chief Justice's 'Mr.
Warren, Earl. A Republic, If You Can Keep It. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972.
The retired Chief Justice's own book, 203 pages from Quadrangle in 1972, three years after he stepped down and two before his death, catalogued under civil rights and constitutional history: Warren on the republic and what keeps it.
Read it →Warren, Earl. “Roger Brooke Taney: Fifth Chief Justice.” American Bar Association Journal 41 (1955).
Warren, Earl. The Memoirs of Earl Warren. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.
Warren's own account, published after his death — reticent and self-justifying in the way of the genre, but candid on his lasting regret over the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, and the closest thing to the man's own summing-up.
Read it →Weaver, John D. Warren: The Man, the Court, the Era. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
One of the 'Two inadequate biographies' of 1967 that Friedman and Israel's chapter dismisses in five words: a journalist's life of the sitting Chief Justice, 428 pages with references and index, written while the Court he led was still deciding.
Read it →Wegman, Jesse. The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution. New York: Celadon Books, 2026.
The first major trade biography of Wilson in decades — published June 2026 by the New York Times editorial-board member behind Let the People Pick the President.
Find a copy →Weisenburger, Francis P. "John McLean, Postmaster-General." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 18, no. 1 (1931): 23–33.
The pre-Court career that explains the man: under Monroe and Adams, McLean built the Post Office into the largest department in the government and ran its thousands of appointments with a nonpartisan skill that made him indispensable to every administration and trusted by none.
Weisenburger, Francis P. The Life of John McLean: A Politician on the United States Supreme Court. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1937.
The whole improbable ascent: the New Jersey-born printer's apprentice who founded a Lebanon, Ohio newspaper, read law, reached Congress at twenty-seven, and built the Post Office into the government's largest machine before Jackson kicked him upstairs in 1829 — then thirty-two years on the bench spent, in no small part, running for president.
Read it →Wellington, Harry H. Interpreting the Constitution: The Supreme Court and the Process of Adjudication. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Argues that the Court reads the Constitution much as judges make common law — language, precedent, structure, and history weighed together with public morality, disciplined by adversary argument and the written opinion.
Wells, Catharine Pierce. Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Willing Servant to an Unknown God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Find a copy →Wermiel, Stephen J. “The Nomination of Justice Brennan: Eisenhower's Mistake? A Look at the Historical Record.” Constitutional Commentary 11 (1995): 515.
The appointment from the Eisenhower papers, by the biographer who had the Brennan ones: the criteria the President gave Brownell (a Democrat, a Catholic, a state judge, under sixty-two), the parish priest asked whether the judge went to Mass, the two White House meetings of September 29, 1956, and the finding on the line everyone repeats, that 'It is probable, if not certain, that Eisenhower never spoke these precise words' and that 'The Eisenhower Library has searched for these words and has never found them.'
Read it →Wesser, Robert F. Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905–1910. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.
The scholarly study of the launching pad — Hughes's rise from the gas and insurance investigations that made his name to two terms as a progressive Republican governor of New York, battling his own party's machine.
Read it →Wexler, Jay D. “Laugh Track II: Still Laughin'!” Yale Law Journal Pocket Part 117 (2007): 130.
The laughter tallies, second round: who got the laughs at oral argument in the 2005 Term, with Scalia first at fifty-four and Thomas at none.
Read it →Whichard, Willis P. "James Iredell: Revolutionist, Constitutionalist, Jurist." In Seriatim: The Supreme Court Before John Marshall (1998).
The best concise treatment of Iredell as a jurist — by his biographer.
Find a copy →Whichard, Willis P. Justice James Iredell. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2000.
The standard modern biography and the clear place to begin.
Find a copy →White, Byron R. “Byron R. White Oral History Interview, JFK #1, May 6, 1964.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Oral History Program (1964).
The sitting justice, six months after Dallas, talking to Joseph F. Dolan for the Kennedy Library: the Oxford year and the embassy ('I met the Kennedy family first at that time'), Munich in the summer of 1939, the 1960 campaign ('I enlisted in his army'), and the Citizens organization the party thought 'an abomination.'
Find a copy →White, G. Edward. Earl Warren: A Public Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
The best analytical biography — G. Edward White, the legal historian, on the arc from California prosecutor and internment advocate to the Chief Justice who led a constitutional revolution, and on the plain moral vision that powered it.
Read it →White, G. Edward. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
The standard scholarly biography and the deepest reckoning with Holmes's mind — six hundred pages from the University of Virginia's great legal historian.
Find a copy →White, G. Edward. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
The short life by the author of the long one: G. Edward White condensed into 176 pages what he had spread over the 1993 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self, for Oxford's Lives and Legacies series.
Find a copy →White, G. Edward. Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.
White gives the whole arc its full weight: the country lawyer who never finished law school, FDR's advocate, the Nuremberg prosecutor, and the author of the finest prose the Court has produced.
Find a copy →White, G. Edward. The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
G. Edward White's profiles of the leading American judges, from Marshall, Kent, Story, Shaw and Taney through Holmes, Brandeis, Hughes, Stone, Jackson, Cardozo, Hand, Frankfurter, Black, Warren, the second Harlan and Douglas to the Burger and Rehnquist Courts, each read for what it shows of a changing judicial tradition; Oxford, January 2007, xxx and 592 pages, a third revised edition. Not read.
Find a copy →White, G. Edward. The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815–1835 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vols. 3–4). Abridged ed., 1991.
The definitive institutional history of Marshall's mature Court — the boardinghouse deliberation, the single-opinion practice, the circuit work, and what dissent cost a justice who tried it.
Find a copy →Whitehouse, Sheldon, and Jennifer Mueller. The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court. New York: The New Press, 2022.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Jennifer Mueller on the donors, front groups and Federalist Society machinery they say produced the present majority, with Citizens United as the decision that made the money possible; The New Press, October 2022, 288 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Whittaker, Charles E. “Dangers of Mass Disobedience.” Reader's Digest (1965).
The retired justice's public voice, three years after the Court: 'No group of men can be permitted, in a government of laws, to take the law into its own hands.'
Whittaker, Charles E., and William Sloane Coffin Jr. Law, Order, and Civil Disobedience. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1967.
The retired Justice against William Sloane Coffin on civil disobedience, viii and 156 pages from the American Enterprise Institute in 1967, five years after the breakdown that ended his tenure, the book-length version of the case he made in the Reader's Digest.
Read it →Whittington, Keith E. Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Keith Whittington on judicial supremacy as something presidents built rather than something judges seized, traced through the constitutional leadership of the presidency across American history; Princeton, 2007, 303 pages, in the Princeton Studies in American Politics. Not read.
Find a copy →Whittington, Keith E. “Reconstructing the Federal Judiciary: The Chase Impeachment and the Constitution.” Studies in American Political Development 9, no. 1 (1995).
The leading political-science account of the impeachment — what the Jeffersonians were actually trying to build, and how the acquittal fixed the boundaries of judicial independence that have held since.
Find a copy →Wiecek, William M. The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941–1953 (Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court, vol. 12). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
The Holmes Devise volume for the Stone and Vinson Courts, 1941 to 1953, 733 pages from Cambridge in 2006, between Tushnet's Hughes Court and the Warren years.
Wiecek, William M. The Dark Past: The US Supreme Court and African Americans, 1800-2015. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
William Wiecek's 552-page history of the Court and Black Americans from 1800 to 2015, slavery, segregation and their sequels, by the author of the Holmes Devise volume on the Stone and Vinson Courts; Oxford, November 2024. Not read.
Find a copy →William H. Moody Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1879-1916.
Seventeen containers, 3,000 items and 3.5 linear feet spanning 1879 to 1916, and a reader should know before travelling that the weight of it falls on 1902 to 1906, when Moody was secretary of the navy and then attorney general: administration, patronage, the Panama Canal and the movements of the fleet, with miscellaneous writings and drafts of speeches.
Read it →William J. Brennan Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1945–1998.
The papers themselves: 379,000 items in 1,088 containers, the case files of opinion and administrative files from his service on the Court, dockets from 1956 to 1975, and correspondence with Black, Douglas, Goldberg, Marshall and Warren.
Read it →“William Johnson, Jr.” South Carolina Encyclopedia. 2006.
Find a copy →William O. Douglas Papers — Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1801–1980.
Among the largest collections of any justice's papers at the Library: 636,500 items in 1,792 containers, the Court files of 1938 to 1975 'containing correspondence, memoranda, docket books, draft and final opinions' term by term, with the speeches, the environmental files and the family papers around them.
Read it →Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 1998.
The best one-volume life, by a journalist who interviewed Marshall extensively in his final years.
Find a copy →Williams, Kenneth. Most Deserving of Death? An Analysis of the Supreme Court's Death Penalty Jurisprudence. Ashgate, 2012.
Kenneth Williams of South Texas College of Law arguing that the Court's capital jurisprudence since Furman has failed to confine the death penalty to the most culpable offenders; Ashgate, 2012, 216 pages, in the Law, Justice and Power series. Not read.
Find a copy →Wilson, Bradford P., ed. The Constitutional Legacy of William H. Rehnquist. West Academic Publishing, 2015.
A short symposium volume, 115 pages from West Academic in 2015, built as three principal essays with commentaries on each: federalism, criminal procedure, and the place of religion in the constitutional design, the three areas the editor takes to be Rehnquist's lasting contributions.
Winger, Stewart L. & Jonathan W. White, eds. Ex parte Milligan Reconsidered: Race and Civil Liberties from the Lincoln Administration to the War on Terror. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2020.
The modern scholarly reckoning with Davis's most famous opinion — a collection that carries Milligan from its Civil War origins through Reconstruction, the World War II Japanese-internment cases, and the post-9/11 detention debates.
Find a copy →Winkler, Adam. We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. New York: Liveright, 2018.
The National Book Award finalist that gives the Powell Memorandum its full historical frame — Powell's tobacco-industry years, the 1971 memo, and his Bellotti opinion as the hinge of the corporate-rights revolution that ran to Citizens United.
Find a copy →Wisniewski, Daniel J. “Heating Up a Case Gone Cold: Revisiting the Charges of Bribery and Official Misconduct Made against Supreme Court Justice Robert Cooper Grier in 1854–55.” Journal of Supreme Court History 38, no. 1 (2013).
The only modern archival study centered on Grier himself — the Wheeling Bridge bribery allegations that nearly ended his career, reopened with the documents.
Read it →Witt, John Fabian. Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (the Wilson chapter). 2007.
Witt's opening chapter is the sharpest short treatment of the Wilson paradox — the cosmopolitan legal philosopher of popular sovereignty who ended as a debtor fleeing his creditors.
Find a copy →Wittke, Carl. “Mr. Justice Clarke. A Supreme Court Judge in Retirement” — Mississippi Valley Historical Review 36, no. 1 (1949): 27–50.
The study of the most remarkable thing Clarke did: resigning the Supreme Court at sixty-five, with a decade of service possible, to campaign for the League of Nations and world peace.
Wohl, Alexander. Father, Son, and Constitution: How Justice Tom Clark and Attorney General Ramsey Clark Shaped American Democracy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013.
The fullest modern study, and an ingenious one — a dual biography of Tom Clark and his son Ramsey, the attorney general whose appointment prompted his father's retirement.
Find a copy →Wolf, Michael Allan. The Supreme Court and the Environment: The Reluctant Protector. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2012.
Edited opinions with introductions covering the Court's environmental decisions from the National Environmental Policy Act onward, by Michael Allan Wolf of the University of Florida; CQ Press, 512 pages, in the Supreme Court's Power in American Politics series, dated December 2011 by the carriers and 2012 by the Library. Not read.
Find a copy →Wood, Gertrude S. William Paterson of New Jersey, 1745–1806. Fair Lawn, NJ: Fair Lawn Press, 1933.
Find a copy →Woodbury, Charles Levi. Memoir of Hon. Levi Woodbury. Boston: David Clapp & Son, 1894.
The son's memorial, four decades on — the Victorian genre this site knows well (compare Tyler's Taney and the Story Life and Letters).
Read it →Woods, William B., reporter. Cases Argued and Determined in the Circuit Courts of the United States for the Fifth Judicial Circuit (4 vols.). Chicago: Callaghan & Co., 1875–1883.
Friedman & Israel call these his best memorial, and they are right: four volumes of Fifth Circuit reports that Woods compiled himself while sitting on the circuit, over Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
Read it →Woodward, Bob, and Scott Armstrong. The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
The famous — and famously controversial — behind-the-scenes account of the early Burger Court, built from clerk interviews and leaked documents.
Find a copy →Wrightsman, Lawrence S. Oral Arguments Before the Supreme Court: An Empirical Approach. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Lawrence Wrightsman's empirical study of oral argument, built on transcripts from eight recent terms and distinguishing ideological cases, on the death penalty, affirmative action, abortion and the environment, from the non-ideological ones on bankruptcy, tax and civil matters; Oxford, April 2008, 208 pages, in the American Psychology-Law Society series. Not read.
Find a copy →Wrightsman, Lawrence S. The Psychology of the Supreme Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lawrence Wrightsman's psychological account of the Court: selection and confirmation, the justices' backgrounds and routines, the role of clerks, the Chief Justice's influence, collegial dynamics and the predictability of votes, with an extended analysis of Bush v. Gore; Oxford, March 2006, 336 pages, in the American Psychology-Law Society series. Not read.
Find a copy →Yackle, Larry. Regulatory Rights: Supreme Court Activism, the Public Interest, and the Making of Constitutional Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Larry Yackle's claim that constitutional protections come from judicial standards of review and rational instrumentalism rather than from fixed textual guarantees, worked through the precedents on racial discrimination, capital punishment and sexual autonomy and the doctrines of due process, equal protection and free expression; Chicago, October 2007, 256 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Yalof, David Alistair. Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the Selection of Supreme Court Nominees. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
The stage before the Senate ever sees a name: how presidents from Truman through Reagan actually chose, reconstructed from presidential papers and interviews with participants up to and including President Ford. Winner of the Neustadt Award for the year's best book on the presidency.
Read it →Yarbrough, Tinsley E. David Hackett Souter: Traditional Republican on the Rehnquist Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
The fullest biography of a justice who guarded his privacy fiercely, by a prolific scholar of the Court.
Find a copy →Yarbrough, Tinsley E. Harry A. Blackmun: The Outsider Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
The full scholarly biography, drawing on Blackmun's vast papers — Tinsley Yarbrough on the anxious, self-doubting 'outsider' who wrote Roe and drifted left across twenty-four years.
Read it →Yarbrough, Tinsley E. John Marshall Harlan: Great Dissenter of the Warren Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
The definitive biography, and a thorough one, by a leading scholar of the modern Court.
Find a copy →Yarbrough, Tinsley E. Judicial Enigma: The First Justice Harlan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Tinsley Yarbrough's biography wrestles with the central puzzle: how a former slaveholder and Kentucky Unionist became the Supreme Court's greatest nineteenth-century champion of Black civil rights.
Yarbrough, Tinsley E. Mr. Justice Black and His Critics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988.
The book for the arguments — Yarbrough lays out the great scholarly debates over Black's jurisprudence: total incorporation, First Amendment absolutism, the literalism that could protect speech and, in his last years, refuse it to protesters.
Read it →Yarbrough, Tinsley E. The Rehnquist Court and the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
The standard study of the Court Rehnquist led — Tinsley Yarbrough on the federalism revival, the retreat on rights, and the consolidation of a conservative majority across two decades.
Read it →Yoo, John, and Robert J. Delahunty. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2023.
A history of the Court from the right by John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, in a series whose title announces its stance, from Hamilton's least dangerous branch to the present; Regnery, June 2023, 256 pages. Not read.
York, City of New; A. Everett Peterson, ed. Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784–1831, vol. 1 (February 10, 1784 to May 9, 1831 series; this volume 1784–1793). New York: City of New York, 1917.
The only contemporary record of the 1785 attempt on his life that this site has reached, and the one the reference works compress to a phrase: at its meeting of October 6, 1785, the Board recorded that 'a most violent Assault hath last Night been committed on Brockholst Livingston' with 'Circumstances which evince an Intention of assassinating him,' and resolved, if the Governor would proclaim a reward, to 'chear fully contribute 125 Dollars' toward the discovery of 'the Perpetrator or Perpetrators or Abettor or Abettors of the said malignant & dangerous Act.'
Read it →Zelden, Charles L. The Supreme Court and Elections: Into the Political Thicket. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010.
Edited decisions with introductions on redistricting, the franchise and the election cases, by Charles Zelden of Nova Southeastern; CQ Press, 385 pages, in the Supreme Court's Power in American Politics series, dated September 2009 by the carriers and 2010 by the Library. Not read.
Zelden, Charles L. Thurgood Marshall: Race, Rights, and the Struggle for a More Perfect Union. Routledge, 2013.
A short life with the documents attached, in Routledge's Historical Americans series: Charles Zelden of Nova Southeastern on the NAACP advocate who won twenty-nine of thirty-two cases at the Court, the federal judge, and the first African American justice, followed by a set of primary sources that put Marshall in his own words.
Find a copy →Zilis, Michael A. The Limits of Legitimacy: Dissenting Opinions, Media Coverage, and Public Responses to Supreme Court Decisions. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Michael Zilis on how coverage shapes acceptance: journalists emphasise dissent over majority reasoning, and the more divided the Court the likelier a ruling is to be called activist; Michigan, September 2015, 254 pages, with case studies, content analysis and framing experiments. Not read.
Find a copy →Zilis, Michael A. The Rights Paradox: How Group Attitudes Shape US Supreme Court Legitimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Michael Zilis of Kentucky on the paradox that the Court must protect minorities while depending on majority support, and on group antipathy as the thing that actually drives public support for it; Cambridge, 176 pages, dated 2020 by the Library and 2021 by the publisher. Not read.
Find a copy →Zimmerman, Joseph F. Interstate Disputes: The Supreme Court's Original Jurisdiction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006.
Joseph Zimmerman on the Court's original jurisdiction over disputes between states: the criteria applied, the role of special masters, the boundary, financial and water cases surveyed, and the argument that interstate compacts would settle most of them better; State University of New York Press, July 2006, 244 pages. Not read.
Find a copy →Zipes, Greg. Justice and Faith: The Frank Murphy Story. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021.
The first Murphy biography since Fine's trilogy — a single-volume modern life of the Court's great bleeding heart, the justice who put 'legalized racism' into the U.S. Reports dissenting in Korematsu.
Find a copy →Zirin, James D. Supremely Partisan: How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
James Zirin, a New York litigator, argues that the justices deploy originalism, textualism, natural law and precedent selectively to reach ends already chosen, across Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, same-sex marriage and the death penalty; Rowman & Littlefield, September 2016, 299 pages. Not read.
Generated from the same dataset that builds the justice shelves, so a book added to a shelf appears here on the next build. A link means we verified a place to find the work; where none is shown, we could not verify one rather than guess.