Kennedy, it was how someone who was so easily dismissed – and whose own early actions and misdeeds compounded that impression – could remake himself into the greatest legislator of his era. PETER CANELLOS: In each case I was drawn to the overall arc of the story. Kennedy to one about Justice John Marshall Harlan. It’s a long conceptual stretch from a book about Sen. Before The Great Dissenter, your previous book was Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy.

Here is our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity. I corresponded with Canellos about his book. He is also a graduate of Columbia Law School. Canellos is the managing editor for enterprise at Politico, overseeing the site’s magazine, investigative journalism, and major projects. Canellos published a new biography of Harlan, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero. Yet his record is not unblemished: He distrusted immigrants from China and even voted to deny citizenship to their U.S.-born children. Ferguson and his series of dissents in the Insular Cases, among many others. Harlan’s moral vision is memorialized in his lone dissent in Plessy v. During his time as an associate justice from 1877 to 1911, he broke with his colleagues in some of the most consequential – and infamous – rulings that the court has ever issued. More than a century before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became legendary for her biting dissents, Justice John Marshall Harlan I was the original notorious dissenter. And he was surely correct in understanding that the equal protection clause must mean that one race never can be superior or subordinate to another. He was prescient in recognizing the need for a strong national government to deal with urgent issues, such as civil rights.

History has vindicated John Marshall Harlan, who dissented in some of the Supreme Court’s worst decisions concerning race and limiting the scope of federal power. 21, 1911) (an African American newspaper) There is no man in this country to whom the colored race is more indebted.

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