Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Scheiber on Warren & the World

Harry Scheiber's new edited collection, Earl Warren and the Warren Court: The Legacy in American and Foreign Law, has just been published by Lexington Books.

Here's the description from the press:

Earl Warren and the Warren Court: The Legacy in American and Foreign Law comprises essays written by leading experts from the fields of law, history, and social science on the most important areas of the Warren Court's contributions in American law. In addition, Scheiber includes appraisals of the Warren Court's influence abroad, written by authorities of legal development in Europe, Latin America, Canada, and East Asia. This book offers a unique set of analyses that portray how innovations in American law generated by the Warren Court led to a reconsideration of law and the judicial role—and in many areas of the world, to transformations in judicial procedure and the advancement of substantive human rights. Also explored within these pages are the personal role of Earl Warren in the shaping of "Warren era" law and the ways in which his character and background influenced his role as Chief Justice.

Contributors include: Melissa Cully Anderson, Bruce E. Cain, Jesse H. Choper, Javier A. Couso, Malcolm Feeley, Sheila Foster, Philip Frickey, Tom Ginsburg, Edward L. Greenspan, Vicki C. Jackson, Yale Kalmisar, Kjell Ake Modeer, Harry N. Scheiber, Gordon Silverstein, Eivind Smith, and William Van Alstyne.


On the topic of the U.S. Supreme Court and the world....there is untapped research to do in travel files and foreign files of Supreme Court justices, supplemented with targeted research in diplomatic history records. The current phenomenon of Supreme Court justices speaking internationally and engaging (and being affected by) global audiences has a long history. Justice Warren, for example, lectured in what was then Tanganyika in 1963, when he, Thurgood Marshall, and other Americans were asked to put a better face on U.S. race relations after civil rights difficulties that year. (My source on that point is an oral history interview in forthcoming work -- no link right now. Sorry.)

Warren himself was interested in comparative law. Here's a little essay on correspondence I found in Warren's papers from the Editor of the American Journal of Comparative Law, commiserating with the Justice about the 9th Circuit librarian's return of copies of the journal in 1955 because "Ours is a Federal Court of Appeals library for the court and those having business before it. Obviously the comparable general laws subsisting in other governments, and most of them comparable only to state laws, would infrequently be of weight in determining what the Federal law is or ought to be."