FIVE CHIEFS: A SUPREME COURT MEMOIR

Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir

Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir

Introduction

“Five Chiefs” refers to the five Chief Justices Justice John Paul Stevens encountered during the course of his more than 60-year career as a law clerk, lawyer, federal court of appeals judge, and Justice on the Supreme Court. Justice Stevens offers lively and engaging insights about each of the five Chiefs with whom he worked: Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and John Roberts. In the process, he discusses their times, judicial approaches and opinions, respective roles on the Court, personal and professional challenges, and their relations (good, bad, or indifferent) with their colleagues and the Court as an institution.

Subject of the Book

Five Chiefs is not a systematic or thematic history of the Supreme Court since the late 1940s, but a series of anecdotes, observations and musings that entertain, enlighten, and inform in an accessible and engaging manner. Five Chiefs is very definitely a personal memoir, and throughout Justice Stevens adopts the rather startling device of referring to his fellow Justices by their first names Bill, Nino, John, Lewis, Ruth, Clarence, etc. rather than by their more formal titles. It took me a few pages to get used to this, but once I did it added to the sense of intimacy and, more importantly, to an understanding of how the Justices actually perceive and relate to one another as real people rather than as mysterious and largely impersonal lawgivers masked within black robes. What do we learn from Five Chiefs? Here are just a few examples. During his year as a law clerk to Justice Wiley Rutledge during the Court's 1947 Term, a young John Paul Stevens had the opportunity to observe his future colleague, Thurgood Marshall, argue an important Equal Protection case to the Court. He describes a lively exchange between “Thurgood” and “Felix (Frankfurter)” that left him with the sense that Marshall was “a remarkably talented advocate”. As for Chief Justice Vinson, Stevens, like most of the other law clerks that year, “was not an especial admirer of the chief.” As “a country lawyer from a small town in Kentucky,” Vinson seemed “a little overwhelmed” by his much more experienced colleagues. Indeed, the young Stevens thought that Vinson “may have a little difficulty following some of the more esoteric arguments advanced by counsel.” Nonetheless, Vinson apparently “had confidence in his ability to identify which outcome of a case would, in his judgment, best serve the public interest.”

Strengths and weakness of the Analysis

Brown v. Board of Education, “one of the greatest achievements in the history of the Court,” was largely the work of Vinson's successor, Chief Justice Earl Warren. In Five Chiefs, Justice Stevens is especially interested in the role that what we would today call “originals” (i.e., looking to the original intent of the Framers as definitive) played in the decision. After Brown was first argued to the Court, the year before Warren's appointment, the Court delayed the decision and “ordered ...