Word: brethren
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Brethren, Woodward & Armstrong...
...Brethren, Woodward & Armstrong
...height of the Agnew scandal in 1973, Baseball Buff Stewart had his clerks slip him play-by-play bulletins on the National League playoffs between the Cincinnati Reds and the New York Mets as he sat on the bench. One note read: "Kranepool flies to right. Agnew resigns." The Brethren also reports some tantalizing What Ifs. The court came within a vote of, in effect, judicially establishing the Equal Rights Amendment: Stewart held back only because he believed that state legislatures would pass the ERA. Muhammad Ali would have gone to jail as a draft resister had a clerk...
...often, however, the politicking and personal enmities depicted in The Brethren obscure what the Justices are really struggling with: the application of the law and the Constitution to complex moral and social questions like abortion, obscenity, busing, the death penalty. The notion that such issues can be considered solely in terms of abstract and impersonal principle is, of course, a myth. Inevitably there are times when the Justices end up voting their own convictions. "Result oriented" jurisprudence such as this has been criticized for years. But a Justice has to persuade his colleagues to produce a five-man majority; votes...
Again and again in The Brethren, blatant ploys or power plays by individual Justices are thwarted by the court as a whole. A poorly reasoned opinion by one Justice is hammered into something coherent and justifiable by others. During the Watergate crisis, when Burger took the court's decision on the Nixon tapes case for himself and botched it, the other Justices conspired to wrest the actual writing of the opinion away from the chief and inserted their own judgments into the final draft. True, Stewart scoffed that the final product had been edited from...