Forget Collegiality. Some of the Best Justices Were ‘Downright Mean’
Friends and colleagues have disputed press accounts that Judge Sonia Sotomayor can be sharp-tongued on the bench. Now a Harvard law professor is mounting a different defense in an op-ed that argues: So what if she is?
“The roots of greatness may be found in difficult personalities,” Harvard law’s Noah Feldman writes for the New York Times. “Measured by their lasting impact on Constitution and country, many of the greatest justices have been irascible, socially distant, personally isolated, arrogant or even downright mean.”
Justice William O. Douglas, whose decision found a right to privacy in the “penumbras” of the Bill of Rights “was an egotist who barely spoke to his colleagues, loved to vote alone, and once said that his law clerks were ‘the lowest form of human life,’ ” according to Feldman. “His personal life was a mess: his divorce in 1953 was the first ever for a sitting justice; he soon followed it up with the second and then the third (each of his four wives was younger and blonder than the previous one). It has never been said better of anyone that he loved humanity and hated people.”
Feldman says Douglas and three other justices in particular show how the best jurists don’t always have the best personalities. Justice Hugo Black tried to overcome his past association with the Ku Klux Klan by finding that separate is not equal. Justice Felix Frankfurter fought to advance the theory of judicial restraint, yet was considered “overbearing and backbiting.” And Justice Robert Jackson, stung when he was overlooked for chief justice, wrote an open letter revealing secret details of the justices’ conferences. Jackson took a year off from the court to be chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, where he helped develop international humanitarian law.
“In the end, to be a great justice you don’t need a judicial temperament,” says Feldman, who is writing a book on the justices appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.