Pillars of Justice: Lawyers and the Liberal Tradition

by Owen M. Fiss

Pillars of Justice explores the purpose and possibilities of life in the law through moving accounts of thirteen lawyers who shaped the legal world during the past half century.Some, such as Thurgood Marshall, were Supreme Court Justices. Others, like John Doar and Burke Marshall, set the civil rights policies of the federal government during the 1960s. Some, including Harry Kalven and Catharine MacKinnon, have taught at the greatest law schools of the nation and nourished the liberalism rooted in the civil rights era. Jurists from abroad—Aharon Barak, for example—were responsible for the rise of the human rights movement that today carries the burden of advancing liberal values. These lawyers came from diverse backgrounds and held various political views. What unites them is a deep, abiding commitment to Brown v. Board of Education as an exceptional moment in the life of the law—a willingness to move mountains, if need be, to ensure that we are living up to our best selves. In tracing how these lawyers over a period of fifty years used the Brown ruling and its spirit as a beacon to guide their endeavors, this history tells the epic story of the liberal tradition in the law.For Owen Fiss, one of the country’s leading constitutional theorists, the people described were mentors, colleagues, friends. In his portraits, Fiss tries to identify the unique qualities of mind and character that made these individuals so important to the institutions and legal principles they served.

Genres: Law, History, Social Justice

208 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 8, 2017

About the author

Owen Fiss is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law of Yale University. He was educated at Dartmouth, Oxford, and Harvard. He clerked for Thurgood Marshall (when Marshall was a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) and later for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. He also served in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Before coming to Yale, Professor Fiss taught at the University of Chicago. At Yale he teaches procedure, legal theory, and constitutional law and is the author of many articles and books on these subjects.

Reviews

[Sean Tenaglia]

“I have been guided by the hope that a discourse that locates fundamental values in the Constitution and that puts the judiciary to the task of articulating those principles that will govern for all time will both discipline the Justices and give us a set of standards that can be used to evaluate their performance. In fact, this is what we saw, or at least what I saw, in Washington in April 1955- not a free-floating idealism, but rather a studied attempt to use the ways of the law to realize the idealistic possibilities of the Constitution.”

[Edward Sullivan]

Not quite what I expected but the profiles are interesting.