Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky Chairman, Board ofEditors This month we have an unusual mixture of articles dealing with a wide range ofinterests— exactly the type of offering we like to put be fore our readers. We are pleased to publish Justice Ginsburg’s lecture, which she delivered at the Society’s Annual Meeting in June, in which she looks at the “stories” ofthe wives of the Justices. Maeva Marcus, who heads up the Society’s Documentary History Project, spoke about the appointments made by the first President at a ceremony at Mount Vernon, part ofthe bicentennial ofthe death ofGeorgeWash ington; her insightful remarks are published herein. The other three articles are advance looks at important books that will be published in the next few years. Jonathan Lurie writes about one ofthe important cases ofthe late nineteenth century, Slaughterhouse, in which the Court for the first time examined the meaning ofthe recently approved Fourteenth Amendment. Given the current debate over how society should deal with “hate speech,” Shawn Francis Peter’s revisitation of the case that enshrined “fighting words” in First Amendmentjurispru dence seems all the morerelevent. Finally, David W. Levy, who is currentlywriting a multi-volume history of the University of Oklahoma, exam ines one of the pre-2?row« integration cases. The practices of judicial biography and constitutional history continue in full vigor, as evidenced in our regular feature by D. Grier Stephenson, Jr., “The Judicial Bookshelf.” But as is our practice, when we run across a book that stands out in its field, we ask an eminent scholar to write a separate essay review. Barry Cushman has challenged the traditional inter pretation of the constitutional crisis of the 1930s, and Richard Friedman, who is writing the Holmes Devise volume on the Supreme Court of that era, evaluates the Cushman the sis. And although there has been a fair amount of writing on the first Justice John Marshall Harlan, Linda Przybyszewski offers a new full-length biography examining many facets of this man’s life. Tony Freyer, who has es sayedjudicial biography in his study ofJustice Hugo L. Black, reviews the Harlan biography for us. We hope that this varied menu will interest you. In each issue we learn more about how scholars look at the Supreme Court, its Jus tices, and its famous decisions, and we find their work characterizedby an infinite variety. v ...