Justice William J. Brennan, Jr

About this book

Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. sat for thirty-four years on the United States Supreme Court. Throughout his tenure on the Court he meticulously examined the body of Constitutional law - and effectively resuscitated its spirit. A champion of minorities and a spokesman for the politically dispossessed, he passionately defended civil rights and strove to bring the nation's disenfranchised into the mainstream of American life. He advanced the political empowerment of American cities and suburbs. He essentially wrote the modern law of freedom of speech and the press. Justice Brennan's retirement in 1990 occasioned tributes from a host of associates, former law clerks, attorneys, judges, professors, journalists, and friends. The reflections on Brennan in Part I of this volume provide intimate, often humorous glimpses into a generous, warm, open-hearted man who also happened to be an intellectual giant and outstanding jurist. In Part II the jurisprudence of Justice Brennan is comprehensively surveyed and lucidly discussed by author and Constitutional law professor Roger Goldman. With care he examines - and in layman's terms explains - Brennan's positions on the issues central to the justice's career: the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, civil rights, education, abortion, obscenity, and capital punishment. Eloquent, persuasive, and faithful to his vision, Justice Brennan authored more than a thousand opinions, concurrences, and dissents in the course of his judicial career. Part III of the book offers twelve landmark decisions written by Brennan that show clearly why history will place him beside John Marshall, Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes as one of the truly great justices in the annals of the United States Supreme Court.