cover image Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence

Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence

Brennan Center for Justice. W. W. Norton & Company, $30 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-393-04110-1

Scheduled for publication on the 91st birthday of retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, this collection of essays by academics, journalists and judicial colleagues is a worthy festschrift. As the editors declare, in Brennan's 34 years on the Court (1956-1990), he helped shape law in a huge number of fields, among them civil liberties, race relations, family law, privacy, crime, poverty and voting rights. And as several writers note, Brennan's humility and humanity in his approach to law, called ""instrumental rationality,"" anchored his progressive impulses in the real world. Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis discuss his role in free speech and the free press; Nat Hentoff recalls Brennan's devotion to the Fourth Amendment; Alan Dershowitz explores the judge's unswerving argument against the death penalty. This volume also elucidates what law students learn: that Brennan's decisions in cases that made fewer headlines helped shape a government ultimately protective of the rights of individuals who receive government benefits (welfare recipients, etc.). While a few essayists do note Brennan missteps, this volume, by design, does not include the critiques of Brennan's judicial philosophy that conservative commentators might have provided. Rosenkranz directs the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law; Schwartz teaches at the University of Tulsa College of Law. (Apr.)