A recent Washington Post story notes that Justice Gorsuch has a new children’s book on the Declaration of Independence, and that it joins a slew of children’s books published by Justice Sotomayor and one by Justice Jackson. Of course these are just part of the library of recent books that a number of the justices, including both Democratic and Republican appointees, have at least nominally authored and very profitably published.
I confess to a particular fascination with Justice Alito’s forthcoming book. Its subtitle and promo copy promises readers not a mere inspiring life story (bad as that is), nor an appropriately narrow focus on his office, but his “View[s]” on “Our Country”–on “faith, the nature of law, and American culture.” It seems to me punishment enough that we are already made to know the justices’ views on life, the universe, and everything when there is at least an ostensible official justification for it. That they should start inflicting their opinions on us with no good reason or any particular qualifications seems more like cruelty. It’s the kind of wanton behavior which, in the old days, constituted both the definition of the crime itself and the customary custodial sentence for committing it: a twice-weekly newspaper column. But tastes vary. Dozens of people eagerly followed the thoughts of Abe Rosenthal, after all.
Other modern judges and justices have navigated the world of books in different ways. I always found Rehnquist’s approach–to apply his dry wit and curiosity to histories of what he thought of as important but decidedly un-current Supreme Court issues–highly creditable. It’s wasn’t an alleged effort to “bring civic education” to anyone; it was more of a gentleman’s hobby, like painting or taking a mistress. I am likewise inclined to view as more than acceptable Justice Scalia’s extrajudicial writing, which was about current legal issues but focused on legal methodology rather than directly on matters of political or cultural controversy. As with Judge Posner’s writing, although to a far lesser degree, I’m also inclined to excuse Scalia’s books, despite my general reservations about extrajudicial writing, because they were interesting and readable, just as I tended to excuse Justice Breyer’s books because they were neither. What they all have in common, to their credit, is that they were narrower in their focus and stuck with topics within the limited range of their expertise. Above all, they were commendable because could not fairly have been said to be aimed at a general public readership–A Matter for Interpretation was not the kind of thing you could hawk on the Today show–or to carry much hope for personal enrichment. Not so today.
The modern extrajudicial output of the Supreme Court strikes me as reviving an altogether different model. The model that Alito, Sotomayor, and the others are following reminds me less of Scalia and Rehnquist and much more of William O. Douglas.
Like the current crop of memoirs and unlike Scalia and Rehnquist’s books, Douglas “in his autobiographical writings and elsewhere presented his life to the public as exemplary.” Like the current writing justices, Douglas found the generous salary of a Supreme Court justice–just shy of $300,000 for associate justices, somewhere between four and five times the median income, although historical comparison is difficult because modern justices are more likely to have spouses who make substantial bank themselves–insufficient. He thus landed on a “financial treadmill” in which he “wrote book after book.” And Douglas, in his books as elsewhere, certainly was not shy about sharing his “Views” on life, culture, and politics.
In his classic review of a biography of Douglas, Richard Posner relates one problem with Douglas’s memoirs: their endless self-romanticization was accompanied by flagrant dishonesty and inaccuracy. I don’t think the current crop of memoirs lacks for self-romanticization. While I strongly doubt they are as dishonest, we should acknowledge that this is merely an assumption. Any final word awaits the fruits of careful investigation and the judgment of history. Lots of perfectly respectable people turn out to be minor or major fabulists. We should wait a couple of decades before concluding with any confidence that today’s crop of memoirs, book-length op-eds, and bagatelles for the toddler set is in fact either more truthful or, more generally, worthier than Go East, Young Man or Beyond the High Himalayas. (I can say already that Beyond the High Himalayas is worthier than any children’s book written, or “written,” by any justice. Most celebrity children’s books are gift-shop junk. The justices have no special expertise in writing for children. And given the level of generality at which a children’s book must be pitched, whatever subject-matter expertise they can bring to something like the Declaration of Independence or how to “shine” is irrelevant.) It is more likely that they will all be just as well-remembered as North From Malaya in the fullness of time. But it is passing strange that we live in a time of rampant, bipartisan William O. Douglas revivalism on the Supreme Court.