Here are the definitive biographies of Justices Louis Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall. Both are inspiring. [Click on the book images for details or to purchase.]

Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
By Melvin Urofsky
Pantheon, 2009, 976 pages
$26.40 hardcover, $21.12 Kindle

Louis Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916 by President Wilson, and served until 1939. He is considered an extraordinary justice because of his mastery of procedural details, his comprehensive research of the facts and the law in each case, and the great clarity and logic of his opinions.

Brandeis was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Jewish immigrants. He entered Harvard Law School when he was eighteen, and graduated in 1877 with the highest grade average in the school’s history.

As a “people’s lawyer” he championed individual rights, defended worker protection and labor laws, and fought against powerful corporations, monopolies, and public corruption. He also helped create the Federal Reserve System.

His nomination to the Supreme Court was bitterly contested not only because he was Jewish, but also because, as Justice William O. Douglas noted, he was incorruptable.  As Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis’s opinions famously included a strong defense of free speech and the right to privacy.

He wrote hundreds of opinions, but the one with the greatest impact on the law—particularly American federalism—may have been Erie Railroad v. Tompkins in 1938. In Erie, the plaintiff brought a personal injury action in federal court because Pennsylvania law was more favorable to the defendant. Erie established the modern doctrine of diversity jurisdiction for federal courts, which essentially says a federal judge can’t make new common law in contradiction to judge-made state law. So the decision prevents the federal government from stealing powers that the Constitution reserved to the states. Erie also discouraged “forum shopping” by plaintiffs in civil actions.

Brandeis was active in the Zionist movement, seeing it as a solution to antisemitism in Europe and Russia, while reviving “the Jewish spirit.” He died in 1941.

Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary
By Juan Williams
Three Rivers Press, 2000, 504 pages
$8.24 paperback

Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967 by President Johnson, and served until 1991. He was admired more as a civil rights litigator than as a justice. His greatest achievement may have been winning the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. Brown overturned the “separate but equal” system of apartheid in education that had been established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

“He led a civil rights revolution in the 20th century that forever changed the landscape of American society,” writes Williams, a Washington Post correspondent and TV commentator. By working through the courts “to eradicate the legacy of slavery and [destroy] the racist segregation system of Jim Crow,” Marshall “had an even more profound and lasting effect on race relations than either…Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X.” (Williams is also the author of Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.)

Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. His great-grandfather was a slave. He graduated first in his class from the historically black Howard University School of Law—having been rejected by the University of Maryland School of Law because of its segregation policy. Years later he successfully sued the University of Maryland for that policy (Murray v. Pearson, 1936).

As an NAACP lawyer, he won his first case (of many to come) before the Supreme Court in 1940, at the age of 32. Later that year he was appointed chief counsel for the NAACP. John Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961; and Lyndon Johnson appointed him solicitor general in 1965, in preparation for the high court nomination.

Williams respectfully glosses over Marshall’s history of heavy drinking and womanizing.

As a Supreme Court justice, he compiled a liberal record that included support of affirmative action and abortion, opposition to the death penalty, and protection of the rights of criminal suspects. But the Supreme Court years are anticlimactic in a heroic, combative, and courageous life, and this part of the biography is slow. Marshall died in 2001.

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The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law
By Mark Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz
NYU Press, 2009, 448 pages
$21.75 hardcover, $14.30 Kindle

Denbeaux and Hafetz, who represented some of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, rely on government data and court testimony, as well as interviews with their clients, to present a chronological narrative of the legal maneuvering that took place at Gitmo—which at its peak housed 750 detainees from 40 countries.

The defense lawyers’ biggest battles involved gaining access to their clients in the first place, and establishing the detainees’ right to habeas corpus. The defendants were by and large underlings who didn’t know anything of value about terrorism, according to the authors. (Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called them “among the most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”) Many of them were isolated for years without diversions or outside contact—and worse. Publishers Weekly said, “The desperate words…of Gitmo detainees on torture grab the heart and do not let go.”

Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials
By Kyndra Rotunda
Carolina Academic Press, 2008, 264 pages
$25.60 hardcover

As a member of the Office of the Chief Prosecutor, U.S. Army Captain (now Major) Kyndra Rotunda prepared war crimes charges against suspected al Qaida and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo. Through a series of vignettes, Rotunda analyzes the laws governing the war on terror, the Geneva Conventions, and the policies toward the treatment and rights of detainees held in Cuba. She describes in detail the detention camp, her experiences with detainees and interrogators, and the work of the Criminal Investigation Task Force around the globe to assemble evidence against suspected terrorists.

The author says that the military commissions at Gitmo gave the detainees more legal rights and privileges than the Geneva Conventions require. She asks, “In a war our enemies call a ‘religious war,’ where radical Islamists use their religion to justify brutally beheading innocent civilians, is it smart to exceed the Geneva Conventions?” Rotunda would have you believe the prisoners were not tortured.

In fact, she noted that gentle interrogations techniques and patience were more effective than harsh interrogation methods, which tends to undermine the Bush administration’s justification for using the latter.

The book’s cover shows a hooded jihadist with the Quran in one hand and a hand grenade in the other, in case you were wondering whose side the author is on.

The National Security Court System: A Natural Evolution of Justice in an Age of Terror
By Glenn Sulmasy
Oxford University Press (USA), 2009, 256 pages
$21.56 hardcover, $16.47 Kindle

The recent Boumediene v. Bush decision, which upheld the right of habeas corpus for Guantanamo detainees, promises to throw national security law into chaos, says Glenn Sulmasy, an expert on national security law. His book opens with a history of America’s long and complicated experience with military commissions, and argues for a more sensible approach to the global war on terror’s unique set of prisoners. He proposes creating a separate standing judicial system, overseen by civilian judges, that allows for habeas corpus appeals and which focuses exclusively on existing war-on-terror cases as well as the inevitable cases to come.

See also: Bush, the Detainees, and the Constitution: The Battle over Presidential Power in the War on Terror, By Howard Ball (University Press of Kansas, 2007, 275 pages, $26.56 hardcover).