Hugo Black a Biography First Edition Signed Roger K .Newman 1994 Supreme Court

Description: Offered Hugo Black a Biography by Roger K. Newman First Edition Autographed Copy blue cloth 741 pp. signed ffep "With Best Wishes, Roger K. Newman. Near Fine JUSTICE Black made his presence felt in many areas -- reapportionment, church and state, right to counsel and, most notably, freedom of expression. But his first memorable opinion was written in a 1940 case, Chambers v. Florida. After six days of almost continuous questioning, four black murder suspects had been subjected to an all-night interrogation. Finally, they had "broken." On the basis of their confessions, they had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Speaking for a unanimous Court, Black overturned the convictions in an opinion that rang with power and brimmed with emotion. Under our constitutional system, he wrote, "courts stand against any winds that blow as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are nonconforming victims of prejudice and public excitement." (Black must have felt comfortable writing this opinion. As a young prosecutor in Alabama he had drafted a grand jury report condemning third-degree tactics by the police.) According to Mr. Newman, Black said that Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (the first of the five Chiefs under whom Black served) "assigned Chambers to me because I was a Southerner." But surely the thought must have crossed Black's mind that Hughes had not forgotten Black's Klan past and was affording him an opportunity to redeem himself. When Hughes gave the Chambers case to Black, he threw him a "fat pitch" -- and Black hit it out of the park. The Chambers case was a turning point in Black's career. "Any doubts about Black's commitment to the Constitution and civil liberties were quickly stilled," Mr. Newman observes. "Commentators heaped praise on him; to his supporters it was vindication." If Chambers was one of Black's brightest moments, the Korematsu case four years later was perhaps the darkest point in his judicial career. In Korematsu v. United States, he wrote the opinion of the Court upholding a military order excluding persons of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, from the West Coast area. As the law professor (now judge) John T. Noonan Jr. expressed it years later in the course of a stinging attack on Black, Fred Korematsu was convicted of "the crime of having not left his home for a stockade surrounded by barbed wire and policed by guards." BLACK insisted that the Japanese exclusion order was based on military necessity, not racial prejudice. But the arguments to the contrary in the 5-4 decision were compelling, and much research conducted since supports the four dissenters. Mr. Newman informs us that the Korematsu case "troubled Black for the rest of his life" -- but "he stood by the opinion until his death." Mr. Newman seems to possess the same doggedness as the subject of his biography. He has spent much of the last 20 years gathering and organizing information for this book and writing it. He studied thousands of files and conducted more than a thousand interviews. He even interviewed the funeral director who furnished the coffin in which Black was buried. The funeral director maintained that only a mahogany coffin selling for $4,000 was suitable for a Supreme Court Justice. But family members and friends (among them Justices Brennan and Byron R. White) were certain that Black "would like the one that costs the least." So Black was buried in a plain pine casket with knotholes in it. A thousand people attended the service for Black in the Washington Cathedral. The simple pine box, recalls Mr. Newman, "looked strangely out of place in the magnificent cathedral." It was, he adds, "a last dissent" by the man from Clay County, Ala.

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