[Orin Kerr, January 12, 2009 at 11:41am] Trackbacks
Former U.S. Supreme Court Clerks Reflect on Their Clerkship Year:
The clerks are a group of six former law clerks from 1951-52, and the reflections were offered in 2007 and (in one case) 2002 and were just published in the St. John's Law Review. Topics include the Steel Seizure Cases, Brown v. Board of Education, and the individual personalities on the Vinson Court.
Steph Houghton (mail):
I had the pleasure of being present for the events recorded in the article when I was a reporter for the Jamestown Post-Journal. John Barret is a great guy as is Greg Petterson. I am a law student now and am highly diverted by seeing this in print.
1.12.2009 3:30pm
Visitor Again:
A fascinating piece. Among the interesting revelations was Justice Frankfurter's admonition to the luncheon meeting of the law clerks to the Justices that they couldn't expect the Court to come down with the school desegregation opinion in an election year. The clerks greeted the suggestion that the Court took political considerations into account with horror, but there should be no doubt that it would have been disastrous had the opinion come down before the 1952 election.

A huge uproar occurred in California in the late Seventies when the state supreme court was accused of delaying a politically controversial opinion until after an election. Public hearings at which the justices testified were conducted and televised in their entirety by PBS.
1.16.2009 7:24pm

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