Thursday, May 2, 2019

Collins on Hayden Covington

Ronald K. L. Collins’s “Thoughts on Hayden C. Covington and the Paucity of Litigation Scholarship," published in the FIU Law Review 13(2019): 599-637 as part of a symposium on Barnette v. West Virginia, is available here.
The world of American free speech law is populated with many names, from Benjamin Bache to Benjamin Gitlow, from James Madison to Alexander Meiklejohn, and from Holmes and Brandeis to Kennedy and Roberts. And then there is Floyd Abrams, the most noted First Amendment lawyer of our time. But what of Hayden Covington, who argued more First Amendment cases in the Supreme Court than all others? Who was he and what is his legacy? And what does his obscurity say about today’s public law scholarship?