Sublime

Eisenhower’s appointment of Earl Warren to be chief justice of the United States, like John Adams’s appointment of John Marshall, was one of the major events of his presidency.

Ultimately, Ike would appoint five justices to the court, including John Marshall Harlan and William Brennan.75 His appointees ushered in a judicial revolution in citizenship law, civil liberties, and civil rights.

For centuries, private attorneys have molded and adapted these legal modules to a changing roster of assets and have thereby enhanced their clients’ wealth. And states have supported the coding of capital by offering their coercive law powers to enforce the legal rights that have been bestowed on capital.

Fortas felt confident that the jurisdictional grounds would persuade a single Supreme Court Justice—particularly the Justice with administrative responsibility for the Fifth Circuit, Hugo Black—to do what a single Circuit Court judge would not: grant their plea for a stay of the injunction and thereby allow Johnson’s name to go on the ballot.

Twenty years before, Cohen told the author, he had considered young Representative Johnson “promising material.” Subsequently, he said, he had been somewhat put off by the “intensity” of Johnson’s ambition. But now, in 1957, talking to Johnson over lunch, he felt that the promise had been fulfilled: “He was a man with a mission”—to pass a civil

Lyndon Johnson’s contention, the judge said, was that, whether or not Coke Stevenson had been wronged, the law was powerless to right that wrong. And with that contention, the judge said, he did not agree. “A sound principle of justice,” he said, is “that there must never arise a wrong for which there is not a tribunal wherein there is a remedy.

With the raising of the jury issue, the civil rights battle at once became even more complicated—a tangle now not only of legal and parliamentary complications but of moral complications as well. No longer was all the right clearly on the side of the liberals. Even Hubert Humphrey, who was to stand fast against the amendment because “you could not