Presented
by the University of Louisville’s Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute in
collaboration with the Filson Historical Society.
By
the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had
molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any
president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice. But the
wartime Roosevelt court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other
supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president. In his new
book The Court at War, Georgetown University Law Center Professor
Cliff Sloan explores this pivotal period and shares the inside story of how one
president altered the most powerful legal institution in the country, with
consequences that endure today. In an instructive tale for modern times, Sloan
discusses the cast of characters that made up the justices—from the mercurial,
Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black,
and from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his
running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg
prosecutor Robert Jackson.
Cliff
Sloan is a professor of constitutional law and criminal justice at Georgetown
University Law Center. He has argued before the Supreme Court seven
times. He has served in all three branches of the federal government,
including as Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure, and is the author of The
Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made and The
Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme
Court.