The Notorious RBG In Song @ConstitutionCtr

The National Constitution Center hosted Notorious RBG in Song last night. Here's a link to the website, where you can hear the performance, which features Patrice Michaels, Kuang-Hao Huang, Andrew Harley, members of the Inscape Chamber Orchester, and Capital Hearings. 

Mendenhall on Jeffrey Rosen's Depiction of Louis Brandeis as the Jeffersonian Jurist @allenmendenhall

Allen Mendenhall, Faulkner University School of Law, is publishing The Jeffersonian Jurist? a Reconsideration of Justice Louis Brandeis and the Libertarian Legal Tradition in the United States in volume 9 of the Elon Law Review (2017). Here is the abstract.

This article explores Jeffrey Rosen’s depiction of Justice Brandeis as a “Jeffersonian prophet,” “the leader of a Jeffersonian tradition,” and “the Jewish Jefferson” to examine the meaning of the term “libertarian” in the context of American constitutional jurisprudence. It argues that Rosen unsettles the characterization of Brandeis as non-libertarian or anti-libertarian and, consequently, destabilizes the very meaning of “libertarianism” as that term is used by self-described libertarians in current scholarship about American constitutionalism. Whether Brandeis was a pure or true libertarian does not concern me. What interests me is the way in which scholars have invoked Brandeis to delimit the nature of libertarian jurisprudence in the American constitutional context. Brandeis simultaneously illuminates and problematizes the designation “libertarian.” His formative influence on American constitutional law elicits dogged attempts to categorize or classify him. He continues to attract admirers and provoke antagonists, both of whom express firm opinions about his association with libertarianism. At stake in the debate over Brandeis’s association with libertarianism is the meaning and import of “libertarian” jurisprudence in our constitutional tradition. Disturbing any consensus regarding the term “libertarian” in the context of American constitutional jurisprudence is significant because it necessitates two questions: what, exactly, is “libertarian” jurisprudence, and who decides? Answers to these questions may disrupt the momentum that self-identified libertarian legal scholars have enjoyed over the last decade and underscore claims to libertarianism that are at odds with that consensus.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Measuring a Supreme Court Justice's "Tweetability" Quotient

Jack Metzler has published Most Tweetable Justice: An Empirical Study. Here is the abstract.

Twitter has profoundly changed how people communicate with one another and learn about the world. In less than a decade since it first launched, Twitter has become the place where all news breaks first, where political revolutions are launched, and where presidential campaigns are conducted. The service has more than half a billion users, who use Twitter to talk about the news, follow celebrities, support sports teams, conduct business, and learn about one another. Twitter has touched every area of human interaction, and the law is no exception. Thus, although no member of the Supreme Court uses Twitter officially (yet), the world needs to know which Justice is most “tweetable.” The paper uses data from the SCOTUS Search database to rank the Justices by whether their oral argument statements are fit to be tweeted.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Thriller From Kermit Roosevelt

Kermit Roosevelt, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, is publishing his second novel, Allegiance  (ReganArts). Here is a description from the publisher's website.

When the news broke about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Caswell “Cash” Harrison was all set to drop out of law school and join the army… until he flunked the physical. Instead, he’s given the opportunity to serve as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. He and another clerk stumble onto a potentially huge conspiracy aimed at guiding the court’s interests, and the cases dealing with the constitutionality of the prison camps created to detain Japanese-Americans seem to play a key part. Then Cash’s colleague dies under mysterious circumstances, and the young, idealistic lawyer is determined to get at the truth. His investigation will take him from the office of J. Edgar Hoover to an internment camp in California, where he directly confronts the consequences of America’s wartime policies. Kermit Roosevelt combines the momentum of a top-notch legal thriller with a thoughtful examination of one of the worst civil rights violations in US history in this long-awaited follow-up to In the Shadow of the Law.

The book will be released August 25, 2015.

"I Dissent": Justice Scalia's Opinions Set To Music

The rock band Coheed and Cambria sets some of Antonin Scalia's more memorable words and lines from two recent important decisions to music here (via Funny or Die)--"jiggery-pokery," "applesauce," "I dissent," and my favorite, "The world does not expect logic [and precision] in poetry" (take that, bards, rhymers, and versifiers!)

For the opinions: See King v. Burwell and Obergefell v. Hodges

For the critique: Oh, you know whom to ask...TNH.

Supreme Court Justices In Pop Culture

Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick and her guests discuss the suddenly expanding cottage industry of biopics and other entertainment focusing on Supreme Court Justices, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, on episode 18 of Slate's podcast Amicus. More here.

But interest in the Justices, or in the Supreme Court generally, as fodder for pop images, isn't new. Consider John Grisham's thriller The Pelican Brief (1992; filmed 1993 with Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington). The Justices turn up in scenes from The People Vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Recount (2008), and Gideon's Trumpet (1980), as well as any number of other films. At least two scholars, Maxwell Bloomfield, and Laura Ray, have examined the image of the Justices in pop culture; their work is quite instructive. Cites below.


Maxwell Bloomfield, The Supreme Court in American Popular Culture, 4 Journal of American Culture 1 (Winter 1981).

Laura Ray, Judicial Fictions: Images of Supreme Court Justices in the Novel, Drama, and Film, 39 Arizona Law Review 151 (1997).