When Arrogance Takes the Bench

By NOAH FELDMAN
NYT

Cambridge, Mass.

TO hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you’d think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story. Measured by their lasting impact on Constitution and country, many of the greatest justices have been irascible, socially distant, personally isolated, arrogant or even downright mean.

Stephen J. Field, appointed by Lincoln, once insulted a woman’s romantic past so outrageously from the bench that her husband later attacked him on a train — and was shot dead by Field’s bodyguard. Louis D. Brandeis was famously distant: one of his law clerks recounted working until the small hours of the morning on a challenging opinion; as he slid his draft under the justice’s door, silent fingers pulled it through, with no human acknowledgment of the joint effort.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. could be charming when he wanted — he especially enjoyed conversation with beautiful, titled women — but he could be brutally dismissive as well. He notoriously approved of sterilizing a woman believed to have a low intelligence because, he said, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

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