Books by Supreme Court Justices

Abstract

Books by Supreme Court Justices1 RONALD K.L. COLLINS In December 1833, the American Month­ ly Review commented on a newly published book by Joseph Story. By that time the fiftyfour -year-old Supreme Court Justice had written or edited some twelve books. These works included a treatise on bills ofexchange, a treatise on pleading, yet another on pleading and assumpsit, commentaries on the law of bailments, a biography, and even a book of poetry titled The PowerofSolitude: A Poem in Two Parts. And he had a new work, a threevolume set with a long title: Commentaries on the Constitution ofthe United States; With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before theAdoption ofthe Constitution. Ofthis book, the American Monthly reviewer wrote: [T]he work is a rare union of patience, brilliancy, and acuteness, and ... [contains] all the learning on the Constitution brought down to the latest period, so as to be invaluable to the lawyer, statesman, politician, and in fine, to every citizen who aims to have a knowledge of the great Charter under which he lives. That review was among the first ofmany such laudatory reviews of a treatise that went on to become canonical in the history of American constitutional law. Joseph Story published another twenty-one books after his Commentaries before he died in 1845. Justice Story’s literary accomplishments notwithstanding, he was not the most prolific Justice—that honor goes to Justice William 0. Douglas. This son of a Scottish Presbyte­ rian minister and former Yale law professor and SEC chairman wrote fifty-one books on a wide variety of topics ranging from foreign policy to psychiatry, from corporate reorganization to environmentalism, and from stare decisis to manifest destiny. If nothing else, Douglas was prolific. In 1958 alone, five works were published under his name, and then in 1960 and 1961, he published four different books for each of those respective years. Justice Story was second in productivity; he had thirty-three books under his byline, followed by William Howard Taft, the onetime President and later Chief Justice, who published thirty different books. BOOKS BY SUPREME COURT JUSTICES 95 Methodology Those of us at SCOTUSblog were pleased to post a listing of all the books written or edited by the Chief Justice and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court and are now honored to have this compilation reproduced in this Journal. So far as books by Justices are concerned, this new offering is more refined, extensive, and currentthan what had appeared previously in Fenton Martin and Robert Goehlert’s The U.S. Supreme Court: A Bibliography (Congressional Quarterly, 1990), which used slightly different selection criteria (e.g., they include titles for which a Justice wrote only a preface, introduction, or chapter). The tally of 353 represents our best current calculation ofthe total numberoftitles (as opposed to volumes, since some titles were multi-volume works). Additionally, this tally pertains only to books (as opposed to separately printed reports, opinions, articles, etc.) published during the Justices ’ lifetimes. Hence, posthumous collections, such as The Selected Papers ofJohn Jay (2010) are not counted. An exception was made for memoirs or diaries written during a Justice’s lifetime but published posthumously, as in the case of The Memoirs of Earl Warren (1977) and From the Diaries ofFelix Frankfurter (1975). But ifthe work ofa Justice was collected and compiled by another, even ifit was during the Justice’s lifetime, I have not included such works in my total tally, though I have included these works [in brackets] in the supplementa­ ry list following the main entries. One such example is [The Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl Warren (1959, 1966) edited by Henry M. Christman], Likewise, the final tally does not include collections ofSupreme Court opinions by a Justice—for example, Dispas­ sionate Justice: A Synthesis of the Judicial Opinions ofRobert H. Jackson (1969) (being a sampling of his judicial opinions). Here again, I tried to list (with brackets) as many of such works as I could. A rare few books that were written by a Justice but discovered long after he died are included in the total tally as in the case of Robert H...