Now and then at the Supreme Court.

• Date: 22 September 2005

The Supreme Court section of the law school's library is crowded with treatises, transcripts, critiques, textbooks, analyses, and biographies. Slim little soft-cover books lean against multipart sets that are shelved next to heavy volumes bound in leather and stamped with gold. But it's not their differences that we notice, for together they tell a single story. Its featured players were our professional ancestors, and what a family tree we have: John Marshall. John Marshall Harlan. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Charles Evans Hughes. Louis D. Brandeis. Harlan Fiske Stone. Felix Frankfurter. Robert H. Jackson. Thurgood Marshall. John Archibald Campbell.

John Archibald Campbell?

Yes, John Archibald Campbell. And Peter V. Daniel, William Johnson, and Melville Weston Fuller. Each is the subject of at least one of the books I couldn't resist perusing when I was supposed to be at work on something else. And then there are justices like William Henry Moody, John Blair, Horace Gray, and Bushrod Washington, each perhaps famous in his own time, but none the subject...