Time Essay: ON CHOOSING JUSTICES

IN recent years, students of the U.S. Supreme Court would leaf through new decisions in hopes of finding an opinion written by Hugo Black or John Harlan. Their extraordinary capacity to clarify and make vivid the issues in a case made their judgments preferred reading to serious scholars of the inexact science that is law. Because they often disagreed, there inevitably were cherished occasions when the two met head to head, as the writers of the major contending opinions. Black—more frequently in the majority—would crisply muster the facts and reasoning that led to the court's ruling, in seemingly impregnable logic. Then...

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