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Liberal Champion
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
October 2010
On Sale: October 4, 2010
688 pages ISBN: 0547149255 EAN: 9780547149257 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
This book is a sweeping and revealing insider look at court
history and the life of William Brennan, champion of free
speech and public access to information, and widely
considered the most influential Supreme Court justice of the
twentieth century.
Before his death, Brennan granted coauthor Stephen Wermiel
access to a trove of personal and court materials that will
not be available to the public until 2017. Wermiel also
conducted more than 60 hours of interviews with Brennan over
the course of six years. No other biographer has enjoyed
this kind of access to a Supreme Court justice or to his papers.
Justice Brennan makes public for the first time the contents
of what Jeffrey Toobin calls “a coveted set of documents,”
Brennan’s case histories, in which he recorded the
strategizing behind all the major battles of the past half
century, including Roe v. Wade, affirmative action, the
death penalty, obscenity law, and the constitutional right
to privacy.
Revelations on a more intimate scale include how Brennan
refused to hire female clerks even as he wrote
groundbreaking women’s rights decisions; his complex stance
as a justice and a Catholic; and new details on Brennan’s
unprecedented working relationship with Chief Justice Earl
Warren. This riveting information—intensely valuable to
readers of all political persuasions—will cement Brennan’s
reputation as epic playmaker of the Court’s most liberal era.
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