Who are the top ten greatest Supreme Court Justices of all time?
Who are the worst ten? Which Supreme Court decision helped lead to
the Civil War? What are the ten greatest and worst Supreme Court
decisions? What are the ten best courtroom movies? Who was the last
to use the Supreme Court spittoon? Who was the first Justice to
wear trousers beneath his Supreme Court robes?
From John Marshall, the greatest Supreme Court Justice, to Alfred
Moore, one of the worst, Bernard Schwartz's A Book of Legal
Lists--the first ever compiled--provides the Ten Bests and Worsts
in American law (and also includes answers to 150 trivia questions
about the legal world). The lists include the greatest dissents and
Supreme Court "might have beens;" greatest non-Supreme Court judges
(Lemuel Shaw, number one on the Greatest list, played a prominent
role in recasting common law into an American mold); greatest and
worst non-Supreme Court decisions; greatest law books; lawyers
(including Alexander Hamilton, Clarence Darrow "Attorney for the
Damned," and Abraham Lincoln); trials; and greatest legal motion
pictures. Each list entry has a short essay by Schwartz explaining
why it is a best or a worst, and it is in these essays that we gain
a wealth of information about the legal world. We learn, for
instance, that Sherman Minton, number ten on the Worst Supreme
Court Justices list, was such a nonentity that he may be best
remembered as the last to use the spittoon provided for each
Justice behind the bench. Before he became Chief Justice, William
H. Rehnquist was known for playing Trivial Pursuit on the bench,
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote 873 opinions for the Court (the most in
its history), and Roger Brooke Taney, number ten on the Greatest
Supreme Court Justices list, was the first Chief Justice to wear
trousers beneath his robes (his predecessors had always given
judgment in knee breeches).
Stretching back to the early 1700s, the law and the judges who
interpret it have maintained a steady presence in our
lives--sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. From
disappointments like Plessy v. Ferguson (number two on the Ten
Worst Supreme Court Decisions list), which gave the lie to the
American ideal "that all men are created equal," to lesser known
but no less important decisions such as the 1933 United States v.
One Book Called "Ulysses," (number nine on the Ten Greatest
Non-Supreme Court Decisions) the landmark First Amendment case that
eased the law governing censorship, Bernard Schwartz provides legal
experts and non-experts alike with entertaining information in a
format that can be found nowhere else.
General
Imprint: |
Oxford UniversityPress
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
September 1999 |
First published: |
February 1999 |
Authors: |
Bernard Schwartz
(Professor of Law)
|
Dimensions: |
203 x 135 x 16mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
302 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-19-512502-3 |
Categories: |
Books >
Law >
Jurisprudence & general issues >
General
|
LSN: |
0-19-512502-9 |
Barcode: |
9780195125023 |
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