Month: June 2012

In light of yesterday’s  Affordable Care Act Decision, John Fabian Witt, guest blogging at Balkinization, looks back at the Supreme Court’s 1937 Stewart Machine Co. v. Davis decision.

This Saturday, June 23, marks the 40^thanniversary of the law commonly known as Title IX, which mandated equal opportunity for women to participate in collegiate athletics.  Some ten years after this legislation, the Supreme Court took up the case of Grove City College v. Bell.  This case extended Title IX protections to women in schools that only accepted indirect federal funds – basic education grants in this instance.  Get a behind the scene look at the Court’s deliberative process by looking at Justice Powell’Grove City case file.

Justice Powell wrote for the Court in eight opinions announced in June 1972.  U. S. v. U. S. D. C., however, may have been the most important, and was certainly the most unexpected, particularly for President Nixon.  (It was announced on June 19, 1972. Was Nixon’s reaction part of the 18 1/2 minute gap on the June 20th oval office recording?  Unlikely, but we will never know.)

Less than a year earlier, citizen Powell had written an article for the Richmond Times-Dispatchthat included a vigorous defense of the “inherent power of the President” to wiretap without a court order in cases of national security.  Here Justice Powell wrote for a unanimous Court in rejecting warrantless wiretaps in domestic security cases.

In Powell’s file for this case, you can read the research materials that may have changed his mind.  You can also see how Justice Douglas convinced the Chief Justice to allow Powell to write this opinion.

As an ever greater amount of interaction with researchers occurs remotely, we have prepared a statement of services to reasonably expect without visiting the archives.  A button to this page has been added to the navigation bar on the left side of the archives homepage.

Electronic access is now available to Justice Powell’s case files for McDonnell Douglas v. Green and Texas Dept. of Community Affairs v. Burdine.

Records managers at W&L Law can now go to a single place to find law school records schedules, general records policy documents and even the next scheduled shredding service pickup.  Remember that you can always contact the archives with any records management questions.

The archives was fortunate to recently acquire books and other materials handed down to the granddaughter of Henry St. George Tucker.  The titles are as follows:

Tucker, Beverly.   A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government (1845) (HST autograph)

Tucker, Beverly.   The Principles of Pleading (1846) (HST autograph)

Tucker, St. George.  Blackstone’s Commentaries (1803)  3 vols.  (v. 1, 3, 4)

Tucker, St. George.  Tucker’s Blackstone .  This is a vanity binding of v. 2 with the index placed in the front.  Highly annotated

Tucker, John Randolph.  American  Bar Association Address (1893)  brittle.  Vanity binding with printed front title “For Henry St. George Tucker From his Father Henry St. George Tucker.”

Letters of John Randolph (1834)

Passmore, Rev. Joseph C.  Bishop Butler’s Ethical Discourses (1855)

Tucker, John Randolph.  MSS Address Book 

Jonathan Alter has written a piece, employing logic of causation similar to that used in the “Get Rid of Cable”  ad campaign, to link Powell and the tragic Florida shooting.  James Burke writ small?