The Pentagon Papers and New York Times v. United States

Prior restraint defeated, at the highest stakes the press lens reaches. When the government tried to stop newspapers from publishing a secret history of the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court refused, holding that the state bears a heavy burden before it can silence the press in advance. The ruling is the modern bedrock of the freedom to publish. The documents and the decision together show a free press and a free court doing exactly what the founders built them to do.

The Civil War veteran who became the most quotable Justice in the history of the Supreme Court. The Common Law opens with the line that organized his whole jurisprudence: the life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience. He believed law grows from the lived needs of a society rather than from pure deduction, and he wrote dissents that became, decades later, the law of the land.