Jousting Justices

by Adam Cohen

New York Times
November 5, 2010

In these equable days on the Supreme Court, when dissents are fashioned as polite disagreements and Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are the best of friends, it is hard to imagine a time when the court was a roiling caldron of ill will. But so it has been at various points in its history — “nine scorpions in a bottle,” in the phrase attributed, perhaps erroneously, to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor, draws on that barbed aphorism for the title of his smart and engaging group biography of four larger-than-life justices appointed by Franklin D. Roose­velt. Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas first served together in 1941, when World War II was raging in Europe, and their contentious terms continued through 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education was decided.

Although all were committed New Dealers and liberals, each adopted his own theory of the Constitution. The visions they expounded still hold sway and, to a striking extent, their interpretive battles are the ones that continue to preoccupy lawyers, law professors and judges.

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