Law Commons^™

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Wise Legal Giant, Thomas A. Schweitzer

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts On Justice Jackson And Brown, John Q. Barrett, Brad Snyder

Faculty Publications

"I think that Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." That's what Supreme Court law clerk William H. Rehnquist wrote privately in December 1952 to his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson. When the memorandum was made public in 1971 and Rehnquist's Supreme Court confirmation hung in the balance, he claimed that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views, not Rehnquist's. Rehnquist was confirmed, but his explanation triggered charges that he had lied and smeared the memory of one of the Court's most revered justices. This Essay analyzes a newly discovered document—a letter Rehnquist wrote to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1955, …

Three Mistakes About Interpretation, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Introductory Remarks: Brown V. Board Of Education And Its Legacy: A Tribute To Justice Thurgood Marshall, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This issue of the Fordham Law Review presents Fordham Law School's tribute to one of the giants of American law and American history on the occasion of his retirement from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall. Because he decided to make the law his career and because of the way in which he pursued that career, the United States today is a remarkably different place than it was in 1933 when he began practice, and ours is a far more just society.

Justice Marshall made history repeatedly--as Chief Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as Judge of the United …

The Meaning Of Equality And The Interpretive Turn, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The turn to hermeneutics and interpretation in contemporary legal theory has contributed at least two central ideas to modern jurisprudential thought: first, that the "meaning" of a text is invariably indeterminate -- what might be called the indeterminacy claim -- and second, that the unavoidably malleable essence of texts -- their essential inessentiality -- entails that interpreting a text is a necessary part of the process of creating the text's meaning. These insights have generated both considerable angst, and considerable excitement among traditional constitutional scholars, primarily because at least on first blush these two claims seem to inescapably imply a …