Feeling the pinch
Inspired by fellow Harvard professor and author Louis Menand, Bemis Professor of International Law Noah Feldman penned a gripping history of four of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s most prominent, and turbulent, Supreme Court justices. “I wanted to try my hand at writing an intellectual history of the Constitution through the stories of the people who shaped it in the middle of the 20th century,” said Feldman, who focused on justices Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, Robert Jackson, and William O. Douglas. Their story, depicted in Feldman’s “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices,” plays out like a political soap opera. “Chosen by FDR as liberals who had attacked Wall Street and supported the New Deal, these justices all believed Congress should be allowed to pass reform legislation without interference from the Supreme Court — the big constitutional question of the 1930s,” explained Feldman. “But as they confronted civil liberties and...