Peter Canellos will be joined by Amy Wildermuth to discuss his biography of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, THE GREAT DISSENTER
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The “superb” (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan’s words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom.
Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible”—and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.
Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a “magnificent” (Douglas Brinkley) and “thoroughly researched” (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system’s most significant failures and most inspiring successes.
Peter. S. Canellos is an award-winning writer and editor of Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, which was a top-10 New York Times bestseller. He is also a longtime senior editor for Politico and formerly The Boston Globe, where he served as Washington Bureau Chief and Editorial Page Editor and oversaw two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects and seven finalists. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School, he has spent much of his career furthering the development of young writers. He is a lead organizer of a global fellowship program at the International Women’s Media Foundation.
Amy J. Wildermuth is currently dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States. Respected for her scholarship in the areas of civil procedure, administrative law, environmental law, and U.S. Supreme Court practice, Professor Wildermuth’s work has been published in law journals such as the Northwestern Law Review, the Emory Law Journal, and the Minnesota Law Review, among others.
The “superb” (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court.
No figure in American public life has had such great expectations thrust upon him and fallen short of them so quickly. But Ted Kennedy, the gregarious, pudgy, and least academically successful of the Kennedy boys, became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation’s keeper of traditional liberalism.
As Peter S.
