A Book of Legal Lists: The Best and Worst in American Law, with 150 Court and Judge Trivia Questions

By Bernard Schwartz and the late Bernard Schwartz

Book Overview

Who are the top ten greatest Supreme Court Justices of all time? Who are the worst ten? Which Supreme Court decision helped lead to the Civil War? What are the ten greatest and worst Supreme Court decisions? What are the ten best courtroom movies? Who was the last to use the Supreme Court spittoon? Who was the first Justice to wear trousers beneath his Supreme Court robes?
From John Marshall, the greatest Supreme Court Justice, to Alfred Moore, one of the worst, Bernard Schwartz's A Book of Legal Lists--the first ever compiled--provides the Ten Bests and Worsts in American law (and also includes answers to 150 trivia questions about the legal world). The lists include the greatest dissents and Supreme Court "might have beens;" greatest non-Supreme Court judges (Lemuel Shaw, number one on the Greatest list, played a prominent role in recasting common law into an American mold); greatest and worst non-Supreme Court decisions; greatest law books; lawyers (including Alexander Hamilton, Clarence Darrow "Attorney for the Damned", and Abraham Lincoln); trials; and greatest legal motion pictures. Each list entry has a short essay by Schwartz explaining why it is a best or a worst, and it is in these essays that we gain a wealth of information about the legal world. We learn, for instance, that Sherman Minton, number ten on the Worst Supreme Court Justices list, was such a nonentity that he may be best remembered as the last to use the spittoon provided for each Justice behind the bench. Before he became Chief Justice, William H. Rehnquist was known for playing Trivial Pursuit on the bench, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote 873 opinions for the Court (the most in its history), and Roger Brooke Taney, number ten on the Greatest Supreme Court Justices list, was the first Chief Justice to wear trousers beneath his robes (his predecessors had always given judgment in knee breeches).
Stretching back to the early 1700s, the law and the judges who interpret it have maintained a steady presence in our lives--sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. From disappointments like Plessy v. Ferguson (number two on the Ten Worst Supreme Court Decisions list), which gave the lie to the American ideal "that all men are created equal," to lesser known but no less important decisions such as the 1933 United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses", (number nine on the Ten Greatest Non-Supreme Court Decisions) the landmark First Amendment case that eased the law governing censorship, Bernard Schwartz provides legal experts and non-experts alike with entertaining information in a format that can be found nowhere else.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195109619
• ISBN13: 9780195109610
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Full of interesting things

This book is very well done, and its listings seem reasonable and informative. The reason I do not give it five stars is because it has no footnotes and no bibliography. For instance, on page 188 Schwartz refers to "Shaw's leading biographer" but does not name him nor the title or date of the biography. How simple to have put a footnote on the page, but there is none. But aside from this failing, this is a fun book to read and enjoy.

Entertaining, but probably only of interest to lawyers

Bernard Schwartz is a renowned constitutional scholar at the University of Tulsa. Mostly, he is known for his research on the Supreme Court, and he has produced a nice history of the Court.This volume is a bit more lighthearted than the usual sort of fare that law professors put out. Basically, Schwartz has identified what in his view are the ten best Supreme Court decisions, the ten worst Supreme Court decisions, the ten best Supreme Court Justices, the ten worst Supreme Court Justices, and so on. For each entry, he has a short description of that case/justice/etc., along with explanations of why it/he made the list.The cases will be familiar to any law student, and many of the cases will be familiar to non-lawyers -- i.e., Brown v. Board of Education, Dred Scott, and so on.At a certain level, however, non-lawyers may find that much of the book is too arcane; Justice Cardozo, for example, is well-known to non-lawyers as having authored the definitive opinion in a bizarre case known as Palsgraf, but to non-lawyers, the reference will be missed.