Tribute by judge guido calabresi, judge dennis davis, rosalind dixon, dieter grimm, patrick o. gudridge, martha minow, margaret jane radin :: The editors of the Harvard Law Review respectfully dedicate the February 2012 issue to Professor Frank I. Michelman.
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Article by amanda l. tyler :: Modern debates about the limits imposed by the Suspension Clause on the Executive’s power to detain citizens without criminal charges during wartime have largely taken place without historical reference to what the Founding generation understood the “Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus” to mean. These debates likewise have largely failed to account for how the Founding generation viewed the relationship between the privilege and the provision for its suspension included in the Suspension Clause. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has emphasized that the Suspension Clause analysis should be guided at a minimum by an understanding of the legal status of the privilege at the time of ratification. This Article seeks to fill this void by exploring the historical record to provide an account of what the Founding generation understood the constitutional “Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus” to be.
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Book Review by kenneth w. mack :: COURAGE TO DISSENT: ATLANTA AND THE LONG HISTORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT. By Tomiko Brown-Nagin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xi, 578. $34.95.

We live in chastened times. A generation ago, young legal academics often desired to explain how the Supreme Court could be an effective participant in the social controversies of the day, and young liberal lawyers believed that public impact litigation could be an effective strategy for social reform. The most visible evidence for that optimism was the NAACP’s desegregation litigation that led to the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which was conventionally seen as the opening act of the civil rights movement. At present, such dreams seem hopelessly utopian. Ambitious legal scholars now make their careers by explaining how, as a descriptive or normative matter, one should not expect courts to be agents of social change. Conservative lawyers, rather than liberals, spend decades developing strategies to effect public policy through the judiciary. Nominees to the Supreme Court routinely express the requisite reverence for the Court’s decision in Brown, and the equally requisite aversion to the judicial role that people once thought the decision symbolized. Historians, too, who once celebrated the NAACP’s school desegregation litigation as a guidepost on the road to racial equality, marked the half-century anniversary of the decision in 2004 with more regret than celebration. Some even lamented the disappearance of the black autonomy that is thought to have existed in a segregated society. In our own time, it has become common to rely on a familiar trope of social thought to explain these changing opinions on the role of law in American life. We are social realists now, the argument goes, and have left behind the liberal idealism of an earlier age. In Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin steps into this contentious territory to show what legal history can contribute to a field where academic writing and political culture seem to have reached a confluence.
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