The Pocket Constitutionalist

• Author: O. W. Wollensak
• Position: Professor

The Pocket Constitutionalist. By Paul R. Baier & Co. Silver Anniversary Fifth Edition. Baton Rouge: Claitor's Publishing Division. 2003. 8vo, pp. lxiii, 320. Soft cover, $30.00.

Professor Baier is following Karl Llewellyn in using a pseudonym. Llewellyn's was "Teufelsdrˆckh," which means "devil's print" in German. See The Karl Llewellyn Papers: A Guide to the Collection 93 (R. M. Ellinwood & W. L. Twining eds. 1970). Llewellyn wrote as Teufelsdrˆckh whenever he wanted to toss out a quasi-heretical piece. Professor Baier's nom de plume derives from O. W. Holmes, Jr., one of Baier's intellectual props, and from "Wollensak," the machine on which he plays the recordings of the oral argument in Supreme Court cases in his constitutional law classes. At the 1980 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in Phoenix, Professor Baier presented a demonstration of the use of these recordings in teaching, and in speaking of the equipment necessary to play the tapes in class, Mr. Baier picked up his trusty Wollensak 2520 and introduced it to the crowd, saying: "This is my associate, Professor Wollensak, whose circle of constitutional acquaintances is wide indeed."

Here is a painstaking production that puts at your fingertips the individual rights opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States all neatly formatted to fit one page apiece. Named after Justice Black's practice of carrying a copy of the Constitution in his pocket, Baier's vade mecum reduces 13,249 pages of United States Reports to 320 tightly drawn digests of leading opinions of the Court from Marbury v. Madison to last Term's Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. The frontispiece is a glossy photograph of the...