Tushnet, Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center, was Marshall's law clerk during the 1972-1973 term and has written authoritatively about the civil rights movement. He knows the man and material, and has selected the entries with care.

The book contains five parts. Part I contains two of Marshall's appeal briefs, including Brown v. Board of Education, and selected transcripts of oral arguments before the Supreme Court. The briefs substantiate Marshall's "sure instinct for the facts that mattered and an ability to present his case in the way his audience . . . would understand." The oral arguments demonstrate his tenacity in urging his positions despite hard questioning. Marshall the lawyer was clearly a product of his mentor Charlie Houston, Dean of Howard Law School, who taught: "Men, you've got to be social engineers. We've got to turn this whole thing around. And the black man has got to do it; nobody's going to do it for you. . . . You've got to get out there and compete with the other man, and you've got to be better than he is. You might never get what you deserve, but you'll certainly not get what you don't deserve."

Marshall the lawyer was painstakingly thorough. One of his many anecdotes (it was said he could tell a story every day for twenty years and never repeat himself) reflects the pride he took in his legal craftsmanship: a Louisiana judge, not favorably disposed to Marshall or his case, still had to admit, "If Mr. Marshall puts his signature on it, you don't have to check [the citations]."

Part II contains speeches and articles by Marshall while he was a lawyer, for the NAACP's magazine and other periodicals. These are interesting glimpses into the fellowship and frustrations of the civil rights effort, as well as Marshall's methods of advocacy. In his testimonial remarks for Philadelphia lawyer Raymond Pace Alexander, Marshall defines true advocacy as "to put your client above everything else . . . in such a fashion as to get the respect of everyone else."

Part III, contains speeches by Marshall when he was a judge. The section includes Marshall's cautionary remarks during the 1987 bicentennial of the Constitution. Only a Constitution "defective from the start" would permit the Supreme Court to assert in 1857 that it provided blacks with "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." It took "several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, that we hold as fundamental today." Also included are Marshall's annual talks at the Second Circuit Judicial Conference. Marshall speaks with great affection for the Second Circuit, with which he was closely affiliated for over a quarter-century, and candidly admits his disagreement with the direction of the Burger and Rehnquist courts.

Part IV, contains a sampling, edited for a general audience, of Justice Marshall's "322 majority opinions, 83 concurrences, and 363 dissents" during his twenty-four years on the Supreme Court. (An appendix catalogs the most significant opinions). The number of dissents is striking. "Maybe I am just a voice crying in the wilderness," Marshall said in 1988, "but as long as I have breath in me I am going to cry."

Randall Kennedy's lucid foreword acknowledges that Marshall's career as an attorney outshone his career as a judge, but only because Marshall's career as a lawyer was so extraordinary that what followed had to be anticlimactic. Another reason for Marshall's limited impact as a judge, at least to-date, is that the court turned rightward just as he became a part of it, and he spent the last part of his career decrying the diminution of principles he had struggled so hard to establish. Sometimes the Court seemed to him to be turning these principles upside down, as in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which Marshall commented: "[I]t must be remembered that, during most of the past 200 years, the Constitution as interpreted by this Court did not prohibit the most ingenious and pervasive forms of discrimination against the Negro. Now, when a State acts to remedy the effects of that legacy of discrimination, I cannot believe that this same Constitution stands as a barrier." The supreme irony is that Marshall's final years on the Court were under Chief Justice Rehnquist, who wrote a memo to Justice Jackson concerning Brown arguing that the "separate but equal" doctrine was perfectly constitutional.

The final section, Reminiscences, is the Columbia Oral History Project interview of Marshall. It is a delightful collection of practiced anecdotes, reflecting Marshall's immense charm and humor. Marshall relates even the most harrowing of episodes, his near lynching, with humor. Arrested on pretext of driving while drunk, he narrowly escaped the lynch mob when a tee-totaling magistrate ordered his release. He called Attorney General Clark (later maneuvered by LBJ to resign his Supreme Court seat to Marshall), who asked, "Where you drunk?" Marshall replied, "Well, Mr. Attorney General, about five minutes after I hang up this phone, I'm going to be drunk."