Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky In our last issue, we ranthree pieces on the first full-time newspaper reporter assigned to cover the U.S. Supreme Court, Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, and we were grati fied by responses we got from people who had known Lewis at the time. But I erred in my introduction when I said that Lewis had been the only reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage ofthe high court. A number ofastute readers e-mailed me to inform me of some thing that I should have known: namely, that the current Times reporter covering the Court, Linda Greenhouse, also won a Pulitzer for her writing, in 1998. Ms. Greenhouse, it should be noted, refers to Lewis as her “colleague and mentor”; she had been invited to participate in the original symposium, but could not sched ule it. So my apologies to Ms. Greenhouse, and a thank-you to all who caught the error. This issue contains a number of interest ing articles. David Lightner looks at how the Supreme Court, reflecting the mood of the country, agonized in its efforts to deal with the constitutional aspects ofthe interstate slave trade. Whilethe SupremeCourtdidnotaddress many war-related issues while the Civil War raged, once peace had been restored, a host of issues dealing with various aspects of the late conflagration arose through the federal courts. Daniel Hamilton examines howthe Court dealt with one problem, and an important one: the confiscation of southern property. Today’s Justices, and even lower federalcourt judges, rarely leave the bench to run for political office. The last Justice who sup posedly harbored such sentiments (or at least the last we know about) was William O. Douglas, who came very close to being on the Democratic ticket in 1944 and then turned down the vice presidential slot four years later. But in the nineteenth century, some mem bers of the Court thought about moving up Pennsylvania Avenue quite a bit, and in 1916, Charles Evans Hughes actually resigned from the Court to acceptthe Republican presidential nomination, losing out narrowly to Woodrow Wilson that November. Allen Sharp gives us a closer look at the presidential ambitions of some of the men who have sat on the high court. v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY At one time all the Justices had pages, boys who essentially served as what we would now call “gofers.” Darryl Gonzalez, who is conducting a general study of pages in both Congress and the Court, ran across a former page, Frank Lyman, and did an oral interview with him. We think readers ofthe Journal will find this behind-the-bench view a little differ ent from our usual article, and that they will be entertained by it. Justice Harry A. Blackmun served a long time on the bench, and the recent opening of his papers will no doubt spur a great many scholars to examine his life and work. We were approached about whether we would be interested in some unpublished speeches that Justice Blackmun had given, and we thought this one gives us a good insight into both the man and thejudge. We want to thank Luther T. Munford, a Blackmun clerk, for giving us this opportunity. Finally, while Grier Stephenson has pro vided us with his usual perceptive reviews in the “Judicial Bookshelf,” every now and then we run an essay review on books that we think are of particular importance. Such a book is a new biography of Justice Wiley Rutledge, one of the most respected mem bers of the bar and bench in his lifetime, but now forgotten by all but scholars of the modern Court. John Ferren, himself a fed eral judge, has written a marvelous book on Rutledge. We asked Professor Scot Powe of the University of Texas Law School, a for mer Supreme Court clerk, to review it. (Truth in advertising requires that you know that the University of North Carolina Press, the pub lisher of the book, secured a subsidy from the Society so it could include illustrations. The Society, of course, had no say in the contents of the book. I, on the other hand, did...