The nine justices on the Supreme Court are a surprisingly literary bunch.
What do Nabokov, Hemingway, Montesquieu, Wittgenstein, Stendhal, Proust, Shakespeare, Dickens, Faulkner, Solzhenitsyn, and Trollope have in common? They’re all readily mentioned by Supreme Court Justices when asked about influences on their decisions and their style of writing. There’s no case here to be made about how literature and philosophy are important because they’re the guiding forces behind Supreme Court decisions. But these interviews show that literature does not merely serve to entertain the Justices: it also has framed their way of looking at the world, and, more importantly, the ways in which they approach composing decisions.
May 26th, 2011 | 10:43 am
The Times article unfortunately – and predictably – takes a couple backhanded swipes at Thomas.
May 26th, 2011 | 11:10 pm
Well, we can add this to the accumulation of evidence why we keep getting such whacked-out decisions from these 9 unelected oligarchs.
This finding is almost as disturbing as Sandra Day O’Connor’s enthusiastic confession of consulting foreign law to interpret the US Constitution.
May 27th, 2011 | 9:23 am
[...] First Thoughts: “The nine justices on the Supreme Court are a surprisingly literary bunch.” What do [...]
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