Introduction: the Supreme Court Historical Society

WARREN E. BURGER

Chief Justice of the United States

With the first number in this annual series of Yearbooks, the Supreme Court Historical Society undertakes to contribute to the professional literature for the Bicentennial of American Independence. This volume also marks its own inaugural activity as an agency devoted to informing the American people about the third, and least understood, branch of government.

The Yearbook appears virtually on the first anniversary of the Society's formal incorporation as a nonprofit educational agency in the District of Columbia. That incorporation in turn marked the culmination of more than three years of planning by the Advisory Committee of legal scholars, historians, archivists, museum and gallery administrators, and interested laymen appointed to consider the broad problems the Society will now seek to treat.

The Supreme Court Historical Society joins similar historical agencies devoted to the interpretation of the White House and the Capitol, but in one sense it has a more difficult task. Most people know, or think they know, what the President and Congress are expected to do under our Constitution. Relatively few have any definite idea of what goes on in the courts generally, and in the Supreme Court of the United States in particular. Even though hundreds of thousands of visitors a year have gone through parts of the building, and perhaps observed oral arguments briefly, for most of them it has remained a remote, austere "marble temple" housing some seldom-seen jurists who periodically issue pronouncements on the law of the land. This is not because the Justices prefer remoteness and surely not because they do not want people to understand the judicial function in our system, but rather because there are few people qualified to interpret and explain this role in terms widely understood.

But the courts, like the other branches of government, ultimately belong to the American people, serving the individual and the general public interest through time-proven legal processes. An independent and disinterested judiciary need not be a mysterious area of government or appear to be an occult priesthood. Like all institutions, it consists of flesh-and-blood mortals with individual personalities, the normal human traits, and past lives whose activities are available to any diligent enough to inquire.

The Historical Society seeks, quite simply, to translate the impersonal and technical elements of the judicial process into understandable and interesting presentations. This will be done in a variety of ways. Recently, for example, the Supreme Court established an office of curator, to provide professional supervision over a number of artifacts and memorabilia already in the Court's possession. Through the curator's office, an expanded program of exhibits, making public some of the collection first exhibited four years ago, has been devised for the main ground floor hall of the Court building itself. While the new Historical Society is not an official agency of the Court or of the government, it obviously will work henceforth in the closest cooperation with the curator's office, as well as with other public and private groups as appropriate, in all activities within the Court building.

The Yearbook is also an obvious medium for interpretation of the story of the Judicial Branch. For this first issue, it seemed appropriate to its sponsors to focus to a large degree on anniversary subjects-the bicentennial of the American judiciary generally, the centen nial view of the Court in the nineteenth century, the fiftieth anniversary of the Judiciary Act of 1925, and the Court's move into the present building. Future annual numbers will of course feature other individuals, great cases, and interesting accounts of the Court's history since the Court was first convened on February 2, 1790.

As the Society grows in number and resources, other undertakings will doubtless become appropriate and will be announced from time to time in the members' quarterly Newsletter. Membership in the Society, it should be stressed, is open to any interested person. Information may be obtained from the Society's offices which are listed along with the membership of the Board of Trustees and the Advisory Board, on page 4.

Following this introduction is an article of personal reminiscence by the Society's first President-- Mrs. William T. Gossett, nee Elizabeth Evans Hughes--on the colorful years when her father was an Associate Justice and later Chief Justice of the United States. This will, it is hoped, become one of the significant features of the Yearbook--personal views of history by those who lived through it. In somewhat similar character is the reprint of experiences in the Supreme Court recalled by former Attorney General Augustus H. Garland.

"We are very quiet there," wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a familiar speech, "but it is the quiet of a storm center, as we all know." Not every generation of Justices, nor every term of Court, has witnessed cataclysmic constitutional decisions, but scarcely a year has passed, since the Constitutional Convention of 1787 created "one Supreme Court" and such other courts as the Congress may from time to time establish, that there have not been interesting and significant people and acts associated with the Court. The Society, and its Yearbook, will undertake to preserve and chronicle some of them and bring them to an increasingly wide audience.

Copyright 1975