President Appoints Professor Justin Driver to Committee on Supreme Court History
Professor Justin Driver has been appointed to the federal committee charged with documenting the history of the U.S. Supreme Court.
President Joe Biden appointed Driver, the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law, to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, the White House announced.
The committee was established by Congress in 1955 to administer funds bequeathed to the United States by the late Associate Justice to document and disseminate the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. Its principal purpose is to publish a multivolume work on the Court’s history. To date, 12 volumes have been published in the series, which now covers up to 1953.
“I am honored that President Biden has afforded me this exciting opportunity to serve on the Holmes Devise Committee,” Driver said. “The Holmes Devise is a storied institution in American law, as these volumes occupy a central place in Supreme Court history.”
Driver will be one of five committee members, who include the Librarian of Congress and four others appointed by the U.S. president. The committee selects a scholar to write each volume of the history and has general supervision of the book series.
The Holmes Devise is a storied institution in American law, as these volumes occupy a central place in Supreme Court history.”
—Professor Justin Driver
Yale Law School has long been associated with the Holmes Devise. Most recently, Sterling Professor of Law Robert C. Post ’77 wrote the volume on the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Howard Taft, published last year. Post’s volume was originally assigned to Sterling Professor of Law Alexander Bickel and then to Chancellor Kent Professor of Legal History Robert Cover. Both died before they could complete a draft.
Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law Owen M. Fiss wrote a prior volume, which focused on the Melvin Fuller Court of 1888–1910. Earlier, Bickel started the volume on the years 1910–1921, which was later completed by then-Professor Benno C. Schmidt Jr. ’66 of Columbia Law School, who went on to become President of Yale University. That book was published in 1984, but Bickel was among the initial group of scholars the committee assigned to the series in the 1950s.
Driver teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law and constitutional theory. He is the author of “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind.” The book was a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year, New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and winner of the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law.
An elected member of the American Law Institute and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Driver is also an editor of the Supreme Court Review. In 2021, President Biden appointed Driver to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
