The second Justice John Marshall Harlan (1899-1971) preached the virtues of judicial restraint and federalism as a persistent dissenter from the reformist decisions of the Warren Court.

Dissenting was a Harlan family tradition. The grandfather whose name John Marshall Harlan bore had been a member of the turn-of-the-century Supreme Court whose lonely protests against racist rulings had made him a legend. The father and son of that first Justice Harlan were also lawyers. His namesake was born in Chicago on May 20, 1899. The second Justice Harlan attended elementary and secondary schools in the United States and Canada, then enrolled at Princeton in 1916. Following his graduation in 1920, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, staying on to study law there and ultimately receiving both B.A. and M.A. degrees. Upon his return to the United States he commenced an apprenticeship with the Wall Street law firm of...