This is a great new biography of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. Harlan is most remembered today for drafting the dissent in the Plessy v Ferguson “separate by equal” case — being one of the lone voices of his era willing to argue that racial segregation was inconsistent with the original meaning of the Constitution and Reconstruction Amendments. But there was much more to his life and jurisprudence than just that one opinion, and this book does a great job telling that story and putting everything in context. We highly recommended this book to lovers of US history and of the law.

I honestly didn’t know much about John Marshall Harlan but I’m grateful I got to read this book and learn more about him. I can’t wait to buy this when it is published so I can spend more time with this book as a physical copy. Excellent research and writing.

Author and journalist Peter Canellos has chosen an excellent moment for a biography of the Supreme Court jurist John Marshall Harlan, whose intellectual evolution and eventual dedication to civil rights is not only inspirational, but more relevant than ever.

The author’s aim is to describe how Harlan went from being a slave-owner in Kentucky to one of the greatest advocates of minority rights of all time during his service on the U.S. Supreme Court. As the author writes:

“Among powerful white officials, one person’s voice rang out. He reminded the nation that the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution promised equal protection under the law. He advocated eloquently for Black rights, along with the health and safety of immigrant industrial workers and the rights of people in places such as Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines, which were ruled by the United States in a time of imperialism.”

One relatively unknown aspect of Harlan’s background is the fact that a Black man and former slave, Robert Harlan, was brought up in Harlan’s house and treated like a brother. There is speculation that Robert was in fact a half-brother of John Marshall Harlan. Robert’s story is also covered by this book, with the author weaving back and forth between the lives of the two men.

Harlan served on the Supreme Court for thirty-four years, from 1877 to 1911. He was appointed to the court by President Rutherford B. Hayes “as a kind of human olive branch to the South,” since the rest of the court was made up of privileged Northerners. Harlan was the only one of the court to have graduated from law school. He was also, as mentioned above, a former slave owner, notwithstanding the unusual status afforded to Robert Harlan.

Thus it is most interesting to see how Harlan come to occupy his position as a liberal bastion among his peers. Notable were his dissents on three infamous civil liberties cases that came before the Court: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Lochner v. New York (1905), and The Civil Rights Cases (1883).

The author writes: “In case after case, he laid out a framework for what would become the twentieth-century civil rights movement.”

Canellos evinces a fine understanding of the legal issues at stake, which he explains clearly for lay readers. But Harlan’s own words, quoted liberally within the book, are also clear as well as inspirational:

For example, in “The Civil Rights Cases of 1883,” Harlan wrote:

“I cannot resist the conclusion that the substance and spirit of the recent amendments to the Constitution [the 13th, 14th, and 15th] have been sacrificed by a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism. It is not the words of the law but the internal sense of it that makes the law; the letter of the law is the body; the sense and reason of the law are the soul.”

Thus, he argued that the majority of the Court was ignoring the plain meaning and intent of the newest amendments, and that their position revealed racial double standards.

[Here one can clearly see the echoes of his criticism when contemplating the opinion by Chief Justice Roberts when striking down an important section of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder (2013).]

The country however, now, after Shelby, and in Harlan’s time, as the author writes, looked to the Court’s majority who gave them security in and protection for their right to discriminate.

Frederick Douglass later wrote of Harlan:

“…I was wont to console myself with what seemed to many a transcendental idea, that one man with God is a majority; that if such a man does not represent what is, he does represent what ought to be, and what ultimately will be.”

This is an excellent description of the importance of John Marshall Harlan, his moral integrity, and of his continuing relevance today.

This double biography - of John and Robert Harlan - will introduce to most readers two unique characters whose stories are fascinating, and representative of the state of the union at the time. It is a book well worth reading!