The following is a guest post by Brandon Fitzgerald, project manager of a Law Library staffing contract, writer and student of poetry and literature.
Upon first reading the news of Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent passing, I recalled a 2015 study crowning him the most literary justice among current justices for citing notable authors 39 times in the 813 opinions he had written up to that point, more than any of his colleagues. This study is more lighthearted than scientific, but as a whole, justices throughout the history of the Supreme Court are a literary bunch.
The topic of law and literature fascinates me and is a movement that continues to gain traction in academia ever since James Boyd White penned The Legal Imagination forty years ago. For National Poetry Month, I decided to write about poetry and the Supreme Court. In researching my post last April on the relationship between law and poetry, I came across a decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [Parhat v. Gates, 532 F.3d 834 (2008)] where the now Supreme Court nominee Judge Merrick Garland