Judge Richard S. Arnold: A Legacy of Justice on the Federal Bench

Abstract:     
In my new book - Judge Richard S. Arnold: A Legacy of Justice on the Federal Bench (Prometheus 2009) - I examine the life and career of Judge Richard Arnold, who served on the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1980-2004. As a college student in the 1950s, Arnold had deep misgivings about Brown v. Board of Education as a constitutional matter. Yet he would later preside over the Little Rock school desegregation cases with a firm commitment to federal protection of civil rights and institutional reform. In this book I examine desegregation and other pressing federal court issues in the closing decades of the twentieth century, including the death penalty, abortion, free speech, and voting rights.

The book also features excerpts from Arnold's diary of his clerkship with Justice William Brennan in 1960, an important year for the Warren Court.

In this SSRN paper, I reproduce the table of contents and the introduction to the book.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 10

Keywords: Richard Arnold, judges, biography, courts, William Brennan, Eighth Circuit, Brown v. Board of Education, school desegregation, death penalty, voting rights

Accepted Paper Series