Recently, I heard a conversation on the radio between Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and one of her many admirers. It was the same evening she was schedule to appear before an audience of thousands at a stadium in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was struck by the cloying and self-congratulatory pronouncements by both of the participants, and asked myself whether any of the more noted jurists of the past would have ever participated in such an exercise.
Vanity and fame tempt everyone, but it's impossible to visualize Justices Holmes, Brandeis, or Cardozo, or in a later day Justices Frankfurter, Black, or Jackson, engaging in such an spectacle. It is true that Judge Learned Hand in 1944 addressed the largest patriotic gathering ever assembled in the United States. But his remarks on that occasion were neither autobiographical nor self-referential. As he said, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right…the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women…which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.”
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