The editors dedicate this transcript to George Johannes, whose diligent note taking in Justice Harlan’s class secured these lectures to “ourselves and our Posterity. Additional annotations are provided when supplemental information will help the reader better understand Harlan’s commentary. References are provided for all quotations, and citations are provided for all cases and publications discussed by Harlan.

Paragraph breaks and punctuation were added as necessary, in order to reflect the cadence of Harlan’s speech. Ferguson has captured the legal imagination in a way matched by few other texts. The lectures were edited to preserve all of Harlan’s words as transcribed, except in cases of clear transcription error. Chin, The Plessy Myth: Justice Harlan and the Chinese Cases, 82 Iowa Law Review 151-182, 151-167 (October, 1996)(176 Footnotes) For a century, the vision of racial equality expressed in John Marshall Harlans dissent in Plessy v. To create this annotated transcript of Justice Harlan’s lectures, Professor Frye purchased a microfilm copy of Johannes’s transcription, made a PDF copy, and transcribed it verbatim by hand. In 1955, Johannes sent his copy of the transcripts to the second Justice Harlan, who eventually deposited them in the Library of Congress. During the 1897–1898 academic year, one of Harlan’s students, George Johannes, along with a classmate, transcribed verbatim the twenty-seven lectures Justice Harlan delivered on constitutional law. He also noted the bias in the court’s judgment, since before the war the court had accorded Congress comparable powers in upholding the various Fugitive Slave Acts. Frye Josh Blackman Michael McCloskey įrom 1889 to 1910, while serving on the United States Supreme Court, the first Justice John Marshall Harlan taught at the Columbian College of Law, which later became The George Washington School of Law. Justice John Marshall Harlan entered the lone dissent in the Civil Rights Cases, pointing out that the court had eviscerated the Fourteenth Amendment of its meaning.

John marshall harlan