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Benjamin H. Barton
BENJAMIN H. BARTON is the author of four groundbreaking books: Fixing Law School, Rebooting Justice, Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession, and The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Courts. He is a Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee where he represented the indigent for 12 years as a clinical law professor, and now teaches torts, contracts, and the A2J Lab. His scholarship has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, The ABA Journal, and TIME magazine. He has won the student-selected outstanding teacher award, the outstanding pro bono faculty advisor award, and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar teaching Comparative Law at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
Titles by this Author
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Read MoreThe current Supreme Court is packed with a very specific type of person: type-A overachievers who have triumphed in a long tournament measuring academic and technical legal excellence. This Court desperately lacks individuals who reflect a different type of “merit.” The book examines the exceptional and varied lives of past greats from John Marshall to Thurgood Marshall and asks how many, if any, of these giants would be nominated today. The book argues against our current bookish and narrow version of meritocracy. Healthier societies offer multiple different routes to success and onto bodies like our Supreme Court.
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Read MoreAmerica is a nation founded on justice and the rule of law. But our laws are too complex, and legal advice too expensive, for poor and even middle-class Americans to get help and vindicate their rights.
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Related Titles
The current Supreme Court is packed with a very specific type of person: type-A overachievers who have triumphed in a long tournament measuring academic and technical legal excellence. This Court desperately lacks individuals who reflect a different type of “merit.” The book examines the exceptional and varied lives of past greats from John Marshall to Thurgood Marshall and asks how many, if any, of these giants would be nominated today. The book argues against our current bookish and narrow version of meritocracy. Healthier societies offer multiple different routes to success and onto bodies like our Supreme Court.
Completing this tour de force of investigative reporting and analysis, Andrew Peyton Thomas conducted exclusive interviews with Justice Antonin Scalia, former President George Bush, and other Washington insiders (along with many of Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court clerks) in re-creating his years on the Court. A former prosecutor and trial lawyer himself, Andrew Peyton Thomas offers an analysis of Justice Thomas’ jurisprudence that dispels the myth that he has merely followed the conservative party line in his decisions.
Clarence Thomas’s 1950s childhood, as a black kid in hyper-segregated Savannah, under the vigilant eye of his ferociously self-reliant grandfather, formed him into the independent-minded, responsible individualist that America’s Founding Fathers assumed—wrongly—would always be this nation’s unique character type. The old-fashioned virtues he learned gave him the strength to reject the 1960s victimology and identity politics in which his well-earned academic success marinated him. When, after decades of government service, constantly battling the responsibility-shirking orthodoxies of racial grievance, he rose to the Supreme Court—after his own confirmation hearings’ up-close experience of the rancorous race and sex politics that define our era—he was uniquely equipped, by character and culture, to understand and revere the Constitution as the Founders wrote it, “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
The story of Barnett’s rise from criminal prosecutor and otherwise anonymous professor to one of the most influential thinkers in America is both gripping and inspiring. It is, in essence, a how-to guide for anyone seeking to advance the cause of justice and liberty for all.
In this unauthorized biography, the most authoritative ever written about the controversial Supreme Court Justice, Andrew Peyton Thomas (no relation) explores Clarence Thomas’ remarkable rise from a childhood of poverty in segregated Georgia to the nation’s highest court. In his attempt to understand what drives the elusive and sometimes enigmatic Justice, the author located and conducted the first-ever interview with Clarence Thomas’ father, as well as interviews with his mother, sister, and other relatives and friends.