Judicial Biography Research Articles

Europe’s legal revolution and France’s Article 49-3: the constitutional audacity of Robert Lecourt

Abstract The European Legal order, created by the European Court of Justice [ECJ], is an astonishingly effective treaty enforcement system. Previous explanations of its ‘transnational’ or ‘constitutional’ development have focused on the politics of judicial networks, and the wider political and economic context of postwar European democracy. Judicial biography has been almost entirely overlooked, even in the case of Robert Lecourt, widely acknowledged as the leading judge in the Court’s revolutionary period. Unknown to research on the ECJ, however, Lecourt had already spearheaded the adoption of the famous Article 49-3 of France’s 1958 Constitution. This paper demonstrates that the constitutional doctrines of European law and Article 49-3 were in fact premised on a similar ideology, that the pursuit of ‘effectiveness’ may require unprecedented restrictions on the traditional law-making role of national parliaments. Those were the constitutional values of the judge that, more than any other, built the foundations of the European legal order.

Judicial biography of Australian Justice, Sir Gerard Brennan Book Review

Judicial biography of Australian Justice, Sir Gerard Brennan Book Review

The Promise of Judicial Biography for the Study of the European Court of Justice

The Promise of Judicial Biography for the Study of the European Court of Justice

Judicial Biography in the National Security Constitution: Lord Diplock and a ‘Rather Silly Little Secret Racket’

This article considers the extra‐judicial work of Lord Diplock in the domain of national security in the context of his life and judicial work. It first considers briefly the role of judicial biography in understanding the work of judges and then the particular considerations which apply to such biography in the context of national security law and practice. The following sections consider Lord Diplock's role in national security oversight, emphasising the wide range of issues with a national security dimension which Diplock was called upon to consider. It then seeks to shed light on the reasons for which he was repeatedly entrusted by the government to consider matters of the utmost sensitivity by turning back to his early life, his service during the second world war, and his work thereafter.

Judicial Biography in the British Empire

This article adds to the biographic "turn" in legal studies. While there is a large body of scholarship examining judges in the United States and the United Kingdom, comparatively little is written on their legal counterparts in the common law world. What can judicial biographies offer for comparative law? Do these studies generate useful information about the movement of law? What can be gained by a better awareness of the lives of those at the top of the colonial legal profession? This article shows that within the common law world, judges, like those in the United States and the United Kingdom, were central figures in the administration of justice and in the colonial socio-political elite. Biographical studies are even more important in understanding the way law moved through the British Empire because the backgrounds of these figures shaped their ability to deal with new social groups and diverse societies, and to create pluralistic solutions to legal problems. As colonial judges had to be geographically mobile to move through the British Empire, they possessed transnational careers and accumulated experiences from different common law based legal systems. Through their role as colonial adjudicators, judges influenced the world around them, in part, due to their experiences and socialization. We argue that judicial biographies provide a new way to see the way law moved across colonial and imperial jurisdictions.

Book Review of White, Earl Warren: A Public Life and Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court – A Judicial Biography

This brief 1985 essay review discusses the nature of Supreme Court decision making as understood by two leading legal scholars, G. Edward White and Bernard Schwartz, in their respective analyses of the work of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the Warren Court in two then-recent books. The essay pays particular attention to each author’s understanding, in connection with his respective analysis, of concepts such as judicial leadership and activism, as well as the connections between the intellectual and political aspects of the Supreme Court’s work and between decision making and opinion writing. Finally, the essay questions the sufficiency of Warren’s alleged reliance on his own ethical values as a basis for constitutional decision making, given the obvious existence of competing ethical values, such as those represented by cost-benefit analysis, which may be held by other Justices.

Judicial Biography in Australia: Current Obstacles and Opportunities

Judicial Biography in Australia: Current Obstacles and Opportunities

TOWARDS A JUDICIAL BIOGRAPHY OF RABBI SHNEUR ZALMAN OF LIADY

AbstractThis study seeks to forge a new avenue of legal scholarship on the modern religious movement known as Hasidism. The paper focuses on Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady (ca. 1745–1812)—Hasidic master, religious thinker, and jurist. Much has been written on Shneur Zalman, his formidable leadership in the face of strident opposition and his groundbreaking religious philosophy. His legacy continues to animate contemporary Judaism, primarily through his spiritual heirs—the Lubavitch Hasidic community—and through his Hasidic thought known as Chabad. The present study maps out an aspect which has been widely neglected, but is nonetheless crucial to understanding this religious leader: Rabbi Shneur Zalman's legal activity. The first part of the study surveys existing research, assessing what has been achieved thus far, and what tools are available for further research. The second part of the essay highlights salient questions to be considered as part of a judicial biography, offering preliminary answers to these questions. The article concludes with the contention that without serious analysis of Rabbi Shneur Zalman's legal writings—or for that matter, legal writings of Hasidic masters in general—any intellectual history of this religious movement will be incomplete.

John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest by Steven P. Brown (review)

Reviewed by: John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest by Steven P. Brown Tony A. Freyer John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest. By Steven P. Brown. Tuscaloosa: University of South Alabama Press, 2012. 328 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1771-3. Professor Steven P. Brown makes a notable contribution in this judicial biography of Supreme Court Justice John McKinley. Brown employs wide-ranging research in numerous newspapers and private papers of McKinley’s political and judicial contemporaries. Brown’s constructive use of these sources ameliorates the research problem that McKinley left few known private papers and authored only a limited number of Supreme Court opinions. Generally, historians neglected the extensive evidence Brown has now developed, establishing a dominant but inaccurate interpretation of McKinley as an unimportant politician and Supreme Court Justice. Brown refutes the view that McKinley was insignificant in Jacksonian politics or on the Taney Court. Given Brown’s strong mobilization of previously unused sources, his inattention to certain secondary sources and some noteworthy McKinley opinions is surprising. Born in 1780, the young McKinley migrated with his parents from Virginia to Lincoln County, Kentucky, a frontier borderland disputed by the Americans, Spain, Britain, and Indian tribes. By 1800 McKinley had abandoned the carpentry trade for admission to the Kentucky bar. While most accounts note these early beginnings, none do as well as Brown explaining that McKinley’s carpenter trade connected him with the agricultural and artisan producer economy which prevailed on the borderland. McKinley’s state and federal electoral successes reflected the practical experience he shared with those competing in the frontier producer economy. He shifted political loyalties among not only Democratic-Republicans, but also, initially, between these coalescing factions and the diminishing Federalists. By 1826 he combined politics with the recognition voiced by future-abolitionist James G. Birney that McKinley “stands” at the “head” of the state’s best legal “Bar” (45) in Madison County, North Alabama. Brown’s extensive explorations of news accounts and various private papers like Birney’s demonstrate that McKinley was an effective elected official and lawyer. A major contribution is Brown’s account of McKinley’s role in the Cypress Land Company, along with Andrew Jackson and others, during [End Page 188] the internationally-known “Alabama fever,” which shaped migration to and settlement of the “old southwest” between the Treaty of Ghent and the aftermath of the Missouri Compromise. Located in the fluid politics and lawmaking of the “old southwest,” Brown explains McKinley’s rise within Jacksonian Democracy and appointment to the Supreme Court. McKinley knew, and at different times supported, both Henry Clay and Jackson. Brown skillfully tracks McKinley’s involvement in the complex Bank of the United State’s regional branch control of credit upon which small-producers and speculators depended during the Alabama land rush. Ultimately, McKinley sided with the state’s Jackson supporters who felt the losses incurred under the BUS credit obligations in Alabama’s troubled land deals. Elected to the Alabama assembly and the U.S. House and Senate, McKinley strengthened the bond with the state’s Jackson constituencies grappling with land and banking issues. Congress increased the size of the Supreme Court from seven to nine amidst the Panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression. Economic hardship further entangled old southwest land disputes in contentious bank credit. As a result, Jackson appointed Tennessee state judge John Catron to the Supreme Court; Martin Van Buren did the same for Alabama’s McKinley. McKinley’s appeals for more reasonably-apportioned federal circuits truly reflected the impediment 10,000 miles presented to providing legal services in the nation’s most extensive circuit. The relief McKinley’s agitation achieved was modest amidst the slave and free-labor states’ growing clash over the contested enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Brown is especially good at reconstituting the comparative operational arduousness of Supreme Court circuit riding. Nearly every member of the Court protested the system from 1789 when Congress created it to final abolition in 1891. McKinley traveled about three times farther than other member of the Taney Court. The rigors of circuit riding often prevented McKinley...

Designing a Course in Judicial Biography

Journal Article Designing a Course in Judicial Biography Get access Mae Kuykendall, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., J.D. Mae Kuykendall, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., J.D. Professor of Law *Michigan State University (kuykend1@law.msu.edu). University of Houston; University of North Carolina; Harvard University. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 53, Issue 4, October 2013, Pages 445–449, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajlh/53.4.445 Published: 01 October 2013

Australian Judicial Biography: Past, Present and Future

This article posits that biographical writing on High Court judges generates insights that may otherwise be overlooked in explorations of national history and politics. Firstly, the article addresses the relative scarcity of such biographies in Australia. It then explores themes common to the existing works and the ways in which they are evoked. The article canvasses some possibilities inherent in judicial biography, expanding briefly on the themes of national and gender identity, before surveying some of the minor controversies of the genre, including the question of who is best qualified to write it. The discussion concludes with the suggestion that the development of this genre would provide nuanced material for legal scholars, historians and political scientists alike.

Griffith, Isaacs and Australian Judicial Biography

A historiographical analysis of judicial biography generates insights into changing understandings of the High Court’s political and symbolic roles and the place of judges in Australian society. This article analyses the ways in which scholars of successive eras have represented Justices Griffith and Isaacs of the High Court. Biographies will inevitably depict an era as well as exploring one discrete individual, and biographical writing on Griffith and Isaacs evokes the establishment and consolidation of the Australian nationstate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article focuses on the extent to which concepts of Australian nationhood and national identity have shaped representations of these two judges.

The Supreme Court: an essential history

For more than two centuries, the U.S. Supreme has provided a battleground for nearly every controversial issue in our nation's history. Now a veteran team of talented historians - including the editors of the acclaimed Landmark Law Cases and American Society series - have produced the most readable, astute, and up-to-date single-volume history of this venerated institution, as engaging for general readers as it is rigorous for scholars. The Supreme Court chronicles an institution that dramatically evolved from six men meeting in borrowed quarters to the most closely watched tribunal in the world. Underscoring the close connection between law and politics, the authors highlight essential issues, cases, and decisions within the context of the times in which the decisions were handed down. Deftly combining doctrine and judicial biography with case law, they demonstrate how the justices have shaped the law and how the law that the makes has shaped our nation, with an emphasis on how the responded - or failed to respond - to the plight of the underdog. Each chapter covers the Court's years under a specific Chief Justice, focusing on cases that are the most reflective of the way the saw the law and the world and that had the most impact on the lives of ordinary Americans. Throughout the authors reveal how - in times of war, class strife, or moral revolution - the sometimes voiced the conscience of the nation and sometimes seemed to lose its moral compass. Their extensive quotes from the Court's opinions and dissents illuminate its inner workings, as well as the personalities and beliefs of the justices and the often-contentious relationships among them. Fair-minded and sharply insightful, The Supreme Court portrays an institution defined by eloquent and pedestrian decisions and by justices ranging from brilliant and wise to slow-witted and expedient. An epic and essential story, it illuminates the Court's role in our lives and its place in our history.

Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism

During a career as both a lawyer and a Supreme Court justice, Benjamin R. Curtis addressed practically every major constitutional question of the mid-nineteenth century, making judgments that still resonate in American law. Aside from a family memoir written by his brother over one hundred years ago, however, no book-length treatment of Curtis exists. Now Stuart Streichler has filled this gap in judicial biography, using Curtis's life and work as a window on the most serious constitutional crisis in American history, the Civil War. Curtis was the lead attorney for President Andrew Johnson in the Senate's impeachment trial, where he delivered the pivotal argument, and his was an influential voice in the pervasive constitutional struggle between states and the federal government. He is best remembered, however, for dissenting in the Dred Scott case, in which he disputed Chief Justice Taney's proslavery ruling that no black person could ever become a citizen of the United States. In the wake of the decision, Curtis resigned from the court, the only justice in the Supreme Court's history to do so on grounds of principle. Yet he also clashed with Boston's abolitionists over enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, and he opposed the Emancipation Proclamation. In a period when the Constitution was radically transformed from a charter that protected slavery to one that granted all persons equal rights of citizenship, Justice Curtis maintained his faith in the Constitution as an adaptable instrument of self-government and tried to mark out a path for gradual change. Streichler assesses Curtis's common-law methods in the context of his divisive times and shows how the judge's views continue to shed light on issues that have become once again relevant, such as the presidential impeachment process and, after 9/11, the use of military tribunals to try civilians.

September Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Irwin N. Gertzog. 2004. Women and Power on Capitol Hill: Reconstructing the Congressional Women's Caucus.Roger Tuller. 2001. Let No Guilty Man Escape: A Judicial Biography of “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker.Ronald Labbe and Jonathan Lurie. 2003. The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Rise of Judicial Management in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1955-2000

This is the first book-length study of a federal district court to analyze the revolutionary changes in its mission, structure, policies, and procedures over the past four decades. As Steven Harmon Wilson chronicles the court's attempts to keep pace with an expanding, diversifying caseload, he situates those efforts within the social, cultural, and political expectations that have prompted the increase in judicial seats from four in 1955 to the current nineteen. Federal judges have progressed from being simply referees of legal disputes to managers of expanding courts, dockets, and staffs, says Wilson. The Southern District of Texas offers an especially instructive model by which to study this transformation. Not only does it contain a varied population of Hispanics, African Americans, and whites, but its jurisdiction includes an international border and some of the busiest seaports in the United States. Wilson identifies three areas of judicial management in which the shift has most clearly manifested itself. Through docket and case management judges have attempted to rationalize the flow of work through the litigation process. Lastly, and most controversially, judges have sought to bring constitutionally flawed institutions into compliance through structural reform rulings in areas such as housing, education, employment, and voting. Wilson draws on sources ranging from judicial biography and oral-history interviews to case files, published opinions, and administrative memoranda. Blending legal history with social science, this important new study ponders the changing meaning of federal judgeship as it shows how judicial management has both helped and hindered the resolution of legal conflicts and the protection of civil rights.

Reviews of Books:"Let No Guilty Man Escape": A Judicial Biography of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker Roger H. Tuller

Reviews of Books:"Let No Guilty Man Escape": A Judicial Biography of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker Roger H. Tuller

Roger H. Tuller. <italic>“Let No Guilty Man Escape”: A Judicial Biography of “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker</italic>. (Legal History of North America, number 9.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 210

Journal Article Roger H. Tuller. “Let No Guilty Man Escape”: A Judicial Biography of “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker. (Legal History of North America, number 9.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 210 Get access Tuller Roger H.. “Let No Guilty Man Escape”: A Judicial Biography of “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker. (Legal History of North America, number 9.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 210. $27.95. Lawrence H. Larsen Lawrence H. Larsen University of Missouri, Kansas City Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 107, Issue 2, April 2002, Page 550, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.2.550 Published: 01 April 2002

"Let No Guilty Man Escape": A Judicial Biography of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker

"Let No Guilty Man Escape": A Judicial Biography of "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker

The republic according to John Marshall Harlan

Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911) is best known for condemning racial segregation in his dissent from Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, when he declared, Our Constitution is color-blind. But in other judicial decisions--as well as in some areas of his life--Harlan's actions directly contradicted the essence of his famous statement. Similarly, Harlan was called the people's judge for favoring income tax and antitrust laws, yet he also upheld doctrines that benefited large corporations. Examining these and other puzzles in Harlan's judicial career, Linda Przybyszewski draws on a rich array of previously neglected sources--including the verbatim transcripts of his 1897-98 lectures on constitutional law, his wife's 1915 memoirs, and a compilation of opinions, drawn up by Harlan himself, that he wanted republished. Her thoughtful examination demonstrates how Harlan inherited the traditions of paternalism, nationalism, and religious faith; how he reshaped these traditions in light of his experiences as a lawyer, political candidate, and judge; and how he justified the vision of the law he wrote. An innovative combination of personal and judicial biography, this book makes an insightful contribution to American constitutional and intellectual history. |Combining judicial and personal biography, this book illuminates the legal thinking and vision of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who served from 1877-1911.