Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky Every time I sit down to write an introduc tion to the next issue oftheJournal, I shake my head in amazement. It is not that the articles we publish are good; they have to be, or we would not be running them. Rather, it is the great and growing diversity ofmaterial that fits into the rubric of Supreme Court history. As those of you who went to law school before the “new” legal history took hold in the 1980s, and even for some of you who went afterward, study of the Supreme Court meant parsing cases. There might be an occasional course inconstitutional historythatwould look beyond the cases to the broader political, eco nomic or cultural events taking place at the time, and even a rare course in judicial biog raphy. One read cases to get the bottom line— what does this case contribute to what the law is now. Digressions on law and economics, law and literature, and other “esoteric” views were offered, ifat all, in elective courses. Unfortunately, that situation still holds true in many law schools, but over the past two decades law professors, historians, and polit ical scientists have come to appreciate that to truly understandthe Supreme Court and its de cisions, one has to look further than the “bot tom line.” This is the approach we have triedto take in the Journal, and from your comments it appears to be succeeding. Who would have thought only a few years ago, for example, that we would carry an ar ticle on Muddy Ruel, a professional baseball player who wound up in the Supreme Court not to sue the professional leagues but to join the bar of the Court. What pleases me most is that the article comes from a law professor, Robert Jarvis ofNova Southeastern University Law School. Douglas Abrams, associate professor of law at the University of Missouri, looks not only at a famous decision—the second flag salute case—but examines Justice Jackson’s iconic opinion not only for the law it ex pounded, but for the inherent passion in it that shows us another side ofajustice who truly de serves far more attention than he has received. While we get many ofour articles through the mail (usually e-mail) and from the Soci ety’s annual lecture series, Tim Huebner, who has joined us as associate editor, and I often find articles by talking to people we know. v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY And sometimes there is just plain luck in be ing at a certain place at the right time. Last year I chaired a session at the annual meet ing of the Organization of American Histori ans, and Marc Lendler, a government profes sor at Smith College, gave a paper on Gitlow v. New York that looked at the majority decision in what I thought was a new and interesting light. So I asked Marc to turn the oral presen tation into an article for the Journal, which he did, and we are pleased to present it. Each year the Society sponsors a lecture at the time of the annual meeting, and this past year Judge Judith Kaye spoke on the law of juvenile justice as it has been shaped by the Court. Judge Kaye served for fifteen years as chiefjudge ofthe New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest tribunal, longer than any other chiefjudge in New York his tory. After her retirement in 2008 she joined Skadden Arps as counsel. A few years ago the common wisdom was that one could not write very much about law clerks because of the oath of confiden tiality they took, but that was before Todd Peppers came along. The Fowler Professor of Public Affairs at Roanoke College, Pep pers realized that there is a great deal that can be mined about clerks and their relation ships to their justices that does not involve breaking the oath, and we have been happy to open the Journal to his articles. In this issue he talks about Justice Hugo Black and how he mentored his clerks, both in the library and on the tennis court. Years ago, when...