Foreword: The Books of Justices
Linda Greenhouse*
For this Michigan Law Review issue devoted to recently published books about law, I thought it would be interesting to see what books made an appearance in the past year’s work of the Supreme Court. I catalogued every citation to every book in those forty opinions in order to see what patterns emerged: what books the justices cited, which justices cited which books, and what use they made of the citations. To begin with, I should define what I mean by “books”. For the purposes of this Foreword, I excluded some types of reading matter that may have a book-like appearance or that others might view as a book: government reports and statistical compilations, including the Federal Sentencing Guidelines; the Model Penal Code; the Congressional Record; the Federal Register; and other current compilations of statutes or regulatory codes. (I include some older compilations as primary source material, e.g., a volume of the Vermont State Papers 1779–1786, published in 1823 and cited by Chief Justice Roberts). I also excluded monographs, databases, and reference materials residing entirely on the Internet.
*Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School. Thanks to Ganesh N. Sitaraman for many enjoyable conversations about this project and to Julie Graves Krishnaswami of the Yale Law Library for her valuable assistance.
