Author Archives: JQB

Please get her to the polls!

Here is a CNN report on Clarina (“Mimi”) Hudon of Manchester, New Hampshire.  Born in 1905, she now is age 110.  She is believed to be the oldest person in the state.

If Mrs. Hudon had been born a little earlier, she would not have been able to vote when she reached adulthood. But when she was fifteen years old, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the vote, was ratified.  In 1928, she voted in her first presidential election, casting her vote for the Democrat, New York governor Al Smith.

Mrs. Hudon knows of Hillary Clinton.  And now she’s heard of Bernie Sanders.

Some New Hampshire official should make it possible for her to vote next Tuesday, for one of them or for whomever.

What Did/Would Chief Justice Rehnquist Think of Ted Cruz?

Ted Cruz, after great success as a Harvard Law School student, became a law clerk to two federal judges.  During 1995-1996, Cruz was a clerk to Judge J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.  During 1996-1997, Cruz clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court for the Chief Justice, William H. Rehnquist.

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It’s of course Ouija Board stuff to wonder what Chief Justice Rehnquist would think today about Senator Cruz as he runs for president.  Rehnquist died in September 2005, when Cruz was the appointed Solicitor General of Texas.  He argued cases regularly, skillfully before the Rehnquist Court.  But I think that no one then was imagining Ted Cruz as a serious presidential candidate, or at least not the one that he is now in his speeches, debates and issue positions.

As a starting point, what did Chief Justice Rehnquist think about Ted Cruz as a person, in his clerkship year and thereafter?

Some might have direct knowledge, but that has not been shared.

Some indications might exist on paper or other media, but they have not surfaced.

Some who knew Rehnquist well could venture their educated guesses, but I don’t know that any has.

I knew Chief Justice Rehnquist only a little bit.  I interviewed and interacted with the Chief Justice a couple of times in 2003, when he generously met with me to discuss Justice Robert H. Jackson, whom Rehnquist had served as a Supreme Court law clerk during 1952-1953.

My guess is that the Chief Justice Rehnquist I met would not have thought well of the Ted Cruz now running for president.  Rehnquist in 2003 was too many things that Cruz seems not to be.  Rehnquist was mellow, relaxed and not judgmental.  He was reflective, including about himself as a law clerk and later.  He had some strong views, of course, but he laughed at extreme partisanship and made fun people who demonized others.  He was kindly.

I suspect that Ted Cruz knows that his candidate persona today is not the late-life Rehnquist type (and maybe that he was not a beloved Rehnquist law clerk).  The evidence is Cruz’s understanding of the Chief he does not resemble—Rehnquist was, Cruz wrote in his memoir last year (click here for an excerpt on his Rehnquist clerkship), “very much a Midwesterner.  He was polite, low-key and modest.”

Chief Justice Rehnquist loved to make small bets, including on politics.  I bet that Rehnquist wouldn’t hesitate to vote against Ted Cruz in a 2016 Republican primary.  I think that Rehnquist would agonize a bit about Jeb Bush, and then he’d vote for John Kasich.

New Bibliography on the Nuremberg Trials

Congratulations and thanks to Professor Kevin Jon Heller and his colleague Catherine E. Gascoigne for producing, just in time for the 70th anniversary of the commencement of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) proceedings at Nuremberg, a new bibliography on the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.

Yes, that’s plural—trials.  The IMT, commencing in Fall 1945 and concluding in Fall 1946, was the one and only international Nuremberg trial.  Thereafter, the United States, with Nuremberg in the center of its military occupation zone in what had been Nazi Germany, conducted twelve additional trials there, before Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMTs), between Fall 1946 and Spring 1949.

A great virtue of the Heller/Gascoigne bibliography is that it lists and also describes in narrative, in fifteen concise pages, leading book-length publications (i.e., books and long articles) on both the IMT and the under-studied NMTs.

The IMT adjudicated the guilt of twenty-two surviving Nazi leaders plus six organizations.  It was the four-nation trial, prosecuted and judged jointly by U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R. and French representatives.  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson served as U.S. chief prosecutor.  The defendants included, to name one handful of the nineteen who were convicted, Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer and Julius Streicher.

The U.S.-only NMTs, often called the “subsequent proceedings” because they followed the IMT, adjudicated the criminal guilt of 177 additional individuals.  General Telford Taylor, previously a senior member of Jackson’s U.S. team before the IMT, served as chief prosecutor.  Each case concerned persons who had worked together in an important sector of the Third Reich.  These cases came to be known by short names of either a leading defendant or the occupational sector:  The Medical Case; The Milch Case; The Justice Case; The Pohl Case; The Flick Case; The I.G. Farben Case; The Hostage Case; The Reich Main Security Office (RuSHA) Case; The Einsatzgruppen Case; The Krupp Case; The Ministries Case; and The High Command Case.

(Unlike that list, which I arranged by the numbers (1-12) that Taylor and team assigned to the cases, Heller and Gascoigne organize NMT case-specific scholarship in alphabetized case-name order.  Neither listing method fully captures the sequence and the various overlaps of the twelve trials; for that, the best book, listed modestly in the new bibliography, is Heller’s own The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (2011).)

This new bibliography is published in the Oxford Bibliographies online series.  That means it is only a click away but, alas, it isn’t free/it is behind a paywall.  I expect that leading libraries subscribe to the Oxford series, so teachers, researchers and students should have relatively easy access.  And anyone else can buy in, of course.

Access to this bibliography, however obtained, is a good development.  It is a fine guide to important resources on cases that are permanently significant, for how they occurred and what they uncovered, and as models and lessons for our time and the future.

(Hat tip:  Kevin Heller himself, here on Opinio Juris.)

Rest in Peace, Louis Stokes

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Louis Stokes, age 90, died on Tuesday at his home in Cleveland, Ohio.  As well-deserved obituaries are reporting, he was a World War II veteran, a lawyer, a civil rights champion, an African-American trailblazer, a Member of Congress for thirty years, and a great humanitarian.

To read more about Louis Stokes’s great life, here are links to stories in The Cleveland Plain Dealer (here and here, and also follow the additional links therein, and here is the image of today’s Plain Dealer front page, which is almost entirely a photograph of Rep. Stokes), The Washington Post (here) and The New York Times (here).

I had the good fortune to know Louis Stokes a little bit over the past decade-plus.  We met in 1998, when he participated in a St. John’s law school conference on the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1968 landmark decision, Terry v. Ohio, which upheld the constitutionality of, while also applying constitutional limits to, police stops and frisks.

Louis Stokes had been John Terry’s lawyer.  Beginning in late 1963, Stokes, then one of Cleveland’s foremost criminal defense lawyers, represented Terry and another man who were charged with illegally carrying concealed weapons after they were stopped and frisked, resulting in their guns being detected and seized, by a Cleveland police officer.

Stokes ably represented the men at trial and on appeal, including before the Supreme Court of the United States.  To listen to his oral argument in Terry v. Ohio, click here.  To read his 1998 reflections on the case and the Court’s decision, adverse to his client John Terry, click here:  Stokes 72StJohnsLRev727.

Through our contacts, I learned that Louis Stokes was not merely a brave pioneer, a great lawyer and a dedicated public servant.  He also was a generous, engaging, unpretentious and very kind person.

He was, in all respects, a hero.  I’m one of millions mourning his loss and giving thanks for his life and example.

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July 4, 2008:  Louis Stokes speaking at Chautauqua Institution.

Go Read a Watchman

I’ve now read Go Set a Watchman and recommend it highly.  I don’t know, of course, if Harper Lee really wanted to publish it, or what she thought in the 1950s and 1960s or later or thinks now about it and To Kill a Mockingbird and their overlapping characters.  I do know that Watchman has a strong plot, gripping writing, and really important ideas to consider about race, constitutional law, Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court, etc.  It’s a book for general readers, including Mockingbird lovers – assuming that Miss Lee thinks this is a finished book and wanted it published, she really aimed it at Mockingbird lovers, with concern to assist their growing up.  (And note that she published this more complicated, adult portrait of “Atticus Finch,” a character that obviously is based on her father Amasa Coleman Lee, long after his death in 1962; she published Mockingbird, with its earlier, simpler and (maybe) heroic Atticus, in 1960, while her father was living.)  Watchman is, in addition to literature that I think is great and will last, a book for anyone who is interested in U.S. history.  And, yes, it’s a book for lawyers, law students and law professors.  (Nuggets:  it has a great wisecrack about Eleanor Roosevelt and mentions Alger Hiss and – a first in fiction? – Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts.)  [Hat tip: Brad Snyder, who got to that late page mentioning OJR before I did.]  So very seriously, buy the book and read it.

Remember Palmer v. Thompson

Last Friday, June 5th, police in McKinney, Texas, a Dallas suburb, were called about some kind of fight or disturbance at a community pool in the Craig Ranch subdivision.  At the scene, the police found teenagers in swimsuits.  At some point, one officer, Cpl. Eric Casebolt, roughly threw a fifteen-year-old girl, who was wearing an unthreatening bikini, to the ground.  He also drew and pointed his gun at two other kids.  They ran away, and luckily no shot was fired.

At least two kids recorded these events on their phones and then made the videos public—click here to view one compilation of the videos.

Corporal Casebolt is white and many of the kids involved are black.  As the videos make plain, one dimension, maybe the defining and driving dimension, of this episode was and is race.

It also is about swimming pools.  As Brit Bennett describes in today’s New York Times (click here), U.S. racism has a long history in the swimming pool context.  Too often, for too many, there has been something ugly, indeed intolerable, about races being together, and with bodies somewhat exposed, near and in shared water.

In highlighting these very real and sadly revealing issues, Ms. Bennett did not mention the U.S. Supreme Court.

Of course the Court did much, especially beginning in the late 1940s and through Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and into the 1960s and later, to interpret and apply the Constitution’s limits on government racism.

But not always.  Not with regard to swimming pools.

In 1962 and earlier, the city of Jackson, Mississippi, had five public parks with swimming pools.  Four of its pools were officially open to whites only, and one pool was open to blacks only.

Black plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit challenging this racial segregation.  A federal Judge declared that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.  The U.S. Circuit Court affirmed, and the Supreme Court declined to review the case.

In Jackson, the city council acted to end segregation in various public places and facilities:  parks, auditoriums, golf courses and the zoo.  But not the pools.  The city decided to close its pools rather than to operate them on a racially integrated basis.

Black residents of Jackson filed a second federal lawsuit, challenging the constitutionality of these actions.  They lost in the District Court and then in the Court of Appeals (by a vote of 7-6).

In June 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that decision.  In Palmer v. Thompson, the Court, by a 5-4 vote, held that the city’s decision to close its pools rather than to integrate them did not violate the Equal Protection Clause.

To read Palmer, click here.

The decision was, underneath the various Justices’ technical discussions of government action and inaction and their statements of personal disapproval of the city’s racism, a striking break from, if not the abandonment of, the Court’s leadership then in explicating our equality Constitution.

William L. Shirer, reporter

Today’s is the 111th anniversary of the birth of a great reporter and writer, William L. Shirer (1904-1993).  On June 22, 1940, a German photographer captured this image of Shirer, seated

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on the right end of a plank, pipe in mouth, typing his story of the day for broadcast on CBS radio.  The location was the forest outside the village of Compiègne, France.  The story, which Shirer thought would be recorded and reviewed by censors before it was transmitted, accidentally reached New York and the world live.  He reported that France had, that day, signed an armistice with Nazi Germany.

Robert H. Jackson’s 123rd Birthday

Today marks the 123rd anniversary of Robert Houghwout Jackson’s birth, at his family’s farm in Spring Creek Township, Warren County, Pennsylvania.

For Jackson Birthday reading, here are links to some previous Jackson Birthday-related posts to my Jackson List:

“Birthday” (click here)

“Jackson Birthdays 2006, 1946 & 1892” (click here)

“Birthday Bonds, Appreciation, Treasure” (click here)

“Turning 54 at Nuremberg”(click here)

“Birthday Cake in Chambers (1952)” (click here)

These and many more posts are on the Jackson List archive site, which is word- and phrase-searchable:  http://thejacksonlist.com/.

Many happy returns of the day, and happy weekend,

Attorney General Order: Keep a Diary

When Francis Biddle became a senior U.S. Department of Justice official (first Solicitor General, then Attorney General) in the 1940s, he “ordered” top lawyers to start keeping diaries.  He explained that diary-keeping would improve performance—having personal records would help everyone “later” when they needed to revisit topics and remember accurately, in detail, what things had happened, how and why.  (Biddle also had an artistic, literary temperament and a strong sense of history; I suspect that he advocated writing not just for its value to management, but also because engaging in the writing craft can bring pleasure to the writer, and because writing lasts.)

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Warner W. Gardner, a leading, great federal government lawyer in the 1930s and 1940s, including in Biddle’s DOJ, told me of Biddle’s edict.  In his old age, Gardner—himself a great writer of briefs, articles, and a superb memoir—lamented that he never complied very well with the order to keep a diary.  He wished he had, but he said that he just never had time and never developed the habit of making the time.  He made some notes now and then, but in hindsight he found them much too spare.

As Gardner realized, Biddle was right.  Days, moments, people, events and words fly by, and often a “later” comes, in places ranging from the workplace to private reflection, when memory is less than a person wants to have.  And of course history loses everyone in the end.  It needs—in the arresting title of Gardner’s memoir—“pebbles from the paths behind.”  (One chapter of Gardner’s memoir is here, and here is an oral history he gave to the Truman presidential library.)

This all comes to mind as I work with 1945-1946 Nuremberg trial documents and personal records.  I’m grateful for every word that “Nurembergers,” including Francis Biddle (who, after his stint as Attorney General, served as U.S. judge there) and of course Robert Jackson, made time to jot amidst their hard post-war work and living conditions.  Such words have solidity and power that memory can’t match.  They permit historians (me and many others) to do their work, and to do it better than they could otherwise.  Contemporaneous words—and specifically the ones that, on assessment, seem reliable—help me to figure out things about Nuremberg such as who really did, saw and said what, how people thought day by day about what they were doing there, and whose later memory is trustworthy and whose is faulty.

This also comes to mind as I read about newsman Brian Williams’s misstatements about what he saw and experienced as a reporter visiting Iraq and the war in 2003.

If some experience or thought might matter, and also for the pleasure, and also for history, try to make time to make some notes.

Why Father Gave Up the Cloth and Other Obituary Gems

I am a regular reader of obituaries – while I recognize and often feel the human sadness that surrounds them, I am an obituary fan.  They’re filled with fascinating history, both private and broadly public.  They prompt thinking and perhaps new reading, listening and sightseeing.  When researched and written with care (see, e.g., the obituary page in each issue of The Economist), they can be special literature, often on much more than the departed.

To start the new year, I recommend Campbell Robertson’s New York Times article, Miller Williams, Plain-Spoken Arkansas Poet, Dies at 84.  (The January 3rd print edition headline was even better:  “Miller Williams, 84, Laconic Arkansas Poet.”)  And I send my condolences to his daughter Lucinda Williams, whose music I will listen to this morning.