Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of June 1st
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It is the 152nd day of the year, leaving 213 days remaining in 2022.
He told stories through the legal writings -- mostly his dissents -- that he penned during his 34 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. He wrote so many dissents, several of which later became an argument for overturning the original decision, that he became known as The Great Dissenter.
In perhaps his most famous dissent, he was the only justice to reject the notion that segregation in the United States was Constitutional. The Court ruled 8-to-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson, which accepted the doctrine of "separate but equal."
Harlan objected and dissented. He wrote that "our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." He said the country and the court would rue the day it approved the separate-but-equal fiction, predicting it would "prove to be as pernicious" as the Dred Scott Decision.
Some 58 years later, he was proven right. In 1954, the court overturned the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
The irony is that Harlan, born into a wealthy, slave-owning family, became an advocate for civil rights on the court. He also wrote with considerable sympathy for the impoverished, and accepted that the post-Civil War Constitutional Amendments radically changed the nature of federal-state relations.
Thus, he also dissented in cases that struck down state minimum-wage laws, and that limited the power of the federal government to enforce anti-trust laws and regulation of businesses. He was the first justice to argue for the incorporation of the Bill of Rights, writing that the 14th Amendment meant they also applied to the states. That notion is now part of our legal tradition.
Harlan died in 1911 in Washington.
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