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History, Myth, Literature, Fiction, Potpourri Judicial Biography Symposium: Keynote University of Chicago Law School Chicago Unbound Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 1995 Judicial Biography: History, Myth, Literature, Fiction, Potpourri Judicial Biography Symposium: Keynote Philip B. Kurland Follow this and additional works at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Philip B. Kurland, "Judicial Biography: History, Myth, Literature, Fiction, Potpourri Judicial Biography Symposium: Keynote," 70 New York University Law Review 489 (1995). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact [email protected]. KEYNOTE JUDICIAL BIOGRAPHY: HISTORY, MYTH, LITERATURE, FICTION, POTPOURRI PmLn B. KURLAND* Last summer, I was enjoying my emeritus status in the mountains of New Hampshire, in my wife's wonderful aerie-a modernly equipped eighteenth-century farm house-where I had the difficult chore of deciding each day whether I would recline on the open porch on the south or the screened porch on the north. The vistas are equally beautiful. The phone rang and I found myself listening to the dulcet tones of Professor Norman Dorsen. He had, he said, arranged this wonderful conference on judicial biography. It was thick with heavy thinkers and great speakers. And our redoubtable Norman, by way of comic relief for his conferees, had the prescience to seek a sitting Supreme Court Justice to speak at the Friday dinner session. But the Justices were all busy, having been booked by Professor Arthur Miller or some other television guru for some equally appro- priate (if extracurricular) judicial activities. Out of desperation, and understanding contemporary views on adhering to budget limitations, Norman asked me to undertake the role of top banana for the evening and talk a little about the Supreme Court in the days before the Flood. (Norman has long been under the illusion that I had once clerked for Joseph Story-or was it John Marshall?) Because Norman was Norman, and because July 1994 was so far away from May 1995, and because my wife had just bought me a Mac- intosh PowerBook which she assured me would write talks all by it- self, all three of us are here tonight. But do not fear, Norman extracted from me a promise of terseness: my talk shall be no longer in fact than an average-length Felix Frankfurter opinion-no matter how tedious it may seem. Let me tell you, as an aside, that I have found in my late years a new savant who, though a lawyer, never served on the Supreme Court: John Sparrow, onetime master of All Souls. Toward the end of an accomplished intellectual life, he privately published a small * William R. Kenan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago. A.B., 1942, University of Pennsylvania; LL.B., 1944, Harvard University. 489 HeinOnline -- 70 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 489 1995 Imaged with the Permission of N.Y.U. Law Review NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 70:489 book of poems including the following, which I offer as explanation not excuse for what I shall say: To age and imbecility resigned I watch the struggles of my failing mind Lumbering along the all-too-well-worn grooves The poor old thing moves slowly-but it moves!' Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his "History" that: "There is properly no history; only biography."'2 As with other New England aphorists of his time, his witticisms often read as well backwards as forwards. Certainly as to American judges other than Justices of the Supreme Court, he might well have said: There is no biography, only history. For with few exceptions, time tends to erase the names of individual jurists. Even the story of the Supreme Court, to the extent that it is marked in history, is that of an institution, perhaps best known by the name of its Chief Justice to whom credit or blame is often attributed for accomplishments or errors most of which are, in fact, not of his doing. The Roosevelt Court, as Professor Pritchett once dubbed it, was the interregnum between the Nine Old Men who frustrated the execu- tion of the New Deal and the Age of Aquarius, which most of you still acknowledge as your salad days. It was this Court of the 1940s to which Norman Dorsen referred me, probably because the young do not believe that much of importance could have occurred before their time. And, in a way, he was right in thinking that this period can be regarded as antediluvian in the history of the Court. It was not the beginning of the Warren Court philosophy of judicial power, but it was the time when some of the shackles of precedent were loosened if not destroyed. Oliver Wendell Holmes often told us that continuity with the past was not a duty, ofily a necessity.3 The Warren Court demonstrated in its way that the past was not even a necessity. It proved that an erased slate was as useful as an empty one if you were allowed the premise that no case was binding on you if you had not been a participant in its decision. The poet W.H. Auden was not a lawyer, but he seemed to 1 John Sparrow, Eppur si muove, in Grave Epigrams and Other Verses 44 (1981). 2 Ralph W. Emerson, History, in Essays: First Series, reprinted in 2 The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson 3, 10 (2d ed. 1979). 3 See, e.g., Oliver W. Holmes, Learning and Science, in Collected Legal Papers 138, 139 (1920) (commenting, in speech delivered at Harvard Law School, that while continuity with past brings a "peculiar logical pleasure ....the present has a right to govern itself so far as it can"); Oliver W. Holmes, Law in Science and Science in Law, in Collected Legal Papers, supra, at 210, 211 (cautioning, in address to New York State Bar Association, that "historic dogma" need not dictate law since "continuity with the past is only a necessity and not a duty"). HeinOnline -- 70 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 490 1995 Imaged with the Permission of N.Y.U. Law Review June 19951 KEYNOTE understand the shift of the Court from a basis in thought to one in feeling in one quatrain of "Law, Say the Gardeners, Is the Sun": Law is the wisdom of the old The impotent grandfathers shrilly scold; The grandchildren put out a treble tongue, Law is the senses of the young 4 It is not to be wondered that the same poem contains the lines: "Law is no more, Law is gone away."5 Of course, if that is true, the subject of this conference becomes all the more important because under such circumstances judicial ac- tion is deemed to turn not at all on the rules and facts and circum- stances, but only on the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the men and women in black robes. But that is for the learned speakers to moot during the day. For my postprandial talk, suffice it to speak a bit of how the Hughes-Stone Courts cleared the path for the halcyon days then-to-come. First, however, I would tell you that some things were a bit differ- ent in those days. For the most part Brandeis's boast that judges were the only officials in government who did their own work was largely still true. The Justices themselves read the briefs, including the peti- tions for certiorari, and themselves wrote the opinions, if often bor- rowing from memoranda from their clerks. But they had time for the business at hand, although they each had but one clerk except for the Chief (who had only two) and Mr. Justice Eugene Gressman (who worked for Frank Murphy and did not have any). They seldom, if ever, talked publicly about the work of the Court-except occasion- ally to Marquis Childs or Drew Pearson-but were rather of the view that they should be a cloistered lot and that judicial opinions should speak for themselves even if in somewhat arcane language. The Jus- tices then seemed, for the most part, to lack what a reviewer of Deirdre Bair's biography of Anals Nin in the New York Tunes called "some of the more unfortunate distinguishing characteristics of our age: an obsession with fame; a zeal for self-advertisement; a tendency to confuse [law] and self-expression; a rejection of intellect in favor of feeling; a romantic glorification of neurosis, selfishness, and irrespon- sibility."' 6 But that was then. Whatever the deficiencies of the Old Court, however, it left much room for complaint, especially among the newly dominant-in 4 W.H. Auden, Law, Say the Gardeners, Is the Sun, in A Treasury of Great Poems 1220, 1221 (Louis Untermeyer ed., 1942). 5 Id. at 1221. 6 Bruce Bawer, I Gave So Much to Others!, N.Y. Times, Mar. 5, 1995, § 7 (Book Re- view), at 10 (reviewing Deirdre Bair, Ana's Nin: A Biography (1995)). HeinOnline -- 70 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 491 1995 Imaged with the Permission of N.Y.U. Law Review NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 70:489 academia at least-school of Realism. For it was still a Court and it believed then, as some still do, in Walt Whitman's conviction "that we ride forward on the shoulders of our ancestors."'7 Precedents still have meaning to some, if only to point out the fallibility of even the most supreme of judicial courts. Precedent was never regarded as a pro- crustean bed to which new decisions had to be shaped, but rather as a devise for explicating a ruling and determining whether the reasons behind the ruling were still persuasively applicable to the questions to be addressed by the Court.
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