The Character of Justice: Rhetoric, Law, and Politics in the Supreme Court Nomination Process

In the book Parry-Giles defends the Senate's prerogative to scrutinize a nominee's published record, judicial philosophy, and political ideology while also offering extended analyses of the public discourse (media reports, congressional testimony, letters to newspapers, and the like) of seven nominations (Louis Brandeis, Charles Evans Hughes, John J. Parker, Thurgood Marshall, Clement Haynsworth, G. Harrold Carswell, and Robert Bork). Contextualizing the emergence of "celebrity" nomination-process discourses in this larger cultural phenomenon might open up additional avenues for analysis.\n Parker "became the ideological embodiment of 'property rights'" (49); Thurgood Marshall "personified the tensions simmering in the civil rights community between those who acceded to the Supreme Court's 'all deliberate speed' language and those who sought a more aggressive approach to segregationist attempts at resistance to Brown" (70); Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell "came to embody an anti- civil rights jurisprudence not so much for their judicial records but for their identities" (113); and Robert Bork "became . . . the embodiment of an apocalyptic vision of U.S. law" (137).