Attorneys who only read weblogs by other attorneys can easily miss out on thoughtful legal commentary in other, less expected places.
So that my law-abiding fellows will not miss out on these online opportunities, I have added a new archive category -- "Beyond the Bar" -- in which to place the occasional pointer to interesting law-related writing from outside what the reader may or may not wish to refer to as "the blawgosphere."
3quarksdaily is a group weblog devoted to posting a mix of links, quotes and essays on cultural matters: art, science, literature and occasionally politics -- the sorts of thing that I generally take up on my other, non-law-oriented weblog, from which I have been linking the quarksters regularly in recent months. Today, however, the subject is legal history. Contributing 3quarks writer Michael Blim, who teaches anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, looks longingly back at what he calls the U.S. Supreme Court's "Brief, Now Lost Legacy of Constitutional Liberalism."
The post is essentially a pre-Valentine's love letter to Associate Justice Hugo L Black -- or perhaps an early acknowledgment of the Justice's 120th birthday, two weeks from today. I do not share Professor Blim's utterly downhearted view of the likely direction of the current Court -- in jurisprudence, it is generally much harder to turn back than it is to set off down a new road in the first place -- nor am I quite so enamored as he with some of the relics of the "Golden Age" of the Court's capital-L Liberalism, but I join him in his fondness for Justice Black as a Bill of Rights absolutist, particularly where the First Amendment is concerned. Excerpt:
Black was the leader, the inspirational force for the Golden Age, serving for 34 years between 1937 and 1971. At first something of an apprentice 'Great Dissenter,' Black soon learned the craft of how to put together majorities. With William Douglas as his great ally, he began making law, affirming the right to counsel for poor defendants in federal trials (1938), demanding racial integration of juries (1939) and due process for black defendants in criminal trials (1941). He ordered the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi (1962). He defended freedom of speech, association, press and religion with an old-fashioned, Bible-thumping injunction that the Founders had said that Congress shall make no law respecting these freedoms, and they meant it. He brooked no compromises with the Bill of Rights, seeing in it a citizen’s sole defense against government tyranny. He defended it against all comers, even those liberals like Felix Frankfurter, and by implication so many others since, who believed that the protections of the Bill of Rights must be balanced against other rights and privileges granted in the Constitution. The Bill of Rights contains 'absolutes,' that were not mere 'admonitions,' in his words, but prohibited prejudicial action of any sort. Unable to get his colleagues to apply the entire Bill of Rights in defense of citizens in altercations with local and state authorities as well as to federal jurisdictions, he painstaking and relentlessly sought over the course of 34 years to achieve the same result piece-meal.
Worth reading for lawyers and nonlawyers alike.
