Supreme Court senility: historian David J. Garrow discusses decrepit judges.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Interview

William Rehnquist, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, announced in October that he had thyroid cancer. John Paul Stevens, the long-serving associate justice, just turned 85. From the outside, it's hard to tell whether they're still able to perform the jobs they hold. But we do have an idea of what the worst-case scenario would look like.

In his last years on the Court, Thurgood Marshall reportedly spent his days telling tales, watching TV, and letting his clerks do the bulk of his work. Slow, feeble, and increasingly deaf, he once embarrassed himself during oral arguments by revealing he didn't realize which side the lawyer he was interrogating represented.

He probably didn't realize it, but he was part of a long Supreme Court tradition. A decade and a half earlier, William O. Douglas closed out his time on the bench by dozing during arguments, addressing people by the wrong names, and speaking in non sequiturs; after his resignation, he continued to show up for work, apparently convinced that he was still on the Court. Joseph McKenna was so incompetent at the end of his term that, in the words of his colleague William Howard Taft, he once "wrote an opinion deciding the case one way when there had been a unanimous vote the other, including his own." Taft stayed on the job a little too long himself: In 1930 Louis Brandeis wrote to Felix Frankfurter that their colleague "had really lost his grip."

This wasn't merely a sad sideshow. In some important cases--notably Bowers v. Hardwick, the infamous 1986 decision that upheld Georgia's sodomy law--an incapacitated judge (in that case, Lewis Powell) actually cast the deciding vote.

These stories, and many others like them, are related in "Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court," a thorough study by the historian David J. Garrow in the Fall 2000 University of Chicago Law Review. Garrow, 52, is best known for his books Bearing the Cross (1987), a Pulitzer-winning biography of Martin Luther King, and Liberty and Sexuality (1994), which explores the background to Roe v. Wade. His article demonstrates in uncomfortable detail that the Supreme Court is an institution not just of laws but of men, and that since the 18th century some of those men have suffered from senility, severe depression, even drug addiction. In the late 1940s, Justice Frank Murphy was hooked on Seconal and then Demerol, and "some of his closest acquaintances were convinced that the Justice was regularly purchasing...