Illinois Justice
The Scandal of 1969 and the Rise of John Paul Stevens
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- $36.99
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
Illinois political scandals reached new depths in the 1960s and ’70s. In Illinois Justice, Kenneth Manaster takes us behind the scenes of one of the most spectacular. The so-called Scandal of 1969 not only ended an Illinois Supreme Court justice’s aspirations to the US Supreme Court, but also marked the beginning of little-known lawyer John Paul Stevens’s rise to the high court.
In 1969, citizen gadfly Sherman Skolnick accused two Illinois Supreme Court justices of accepting valuable bank stock from an influential Chicago lawyer in exchange for deciding an important case in the lawyer’s favor. The resulting feverish media coverage prompted the state supreme court to appoint a special commission to investigate. Within six weeks and on a shoestring budget, the commission mobilized a small volunteer staff to reveal the facts. Stevens, then a relatively unknown Chicago lawyer, served as chief counsel. His work on this investigation would launch him into the public spotlight and onto the bench.
Manaster, who served on the commission, tells the real story of the investigation, detailing the dead ends, tactics, and triumphs. Manaster expertly traces Stevens’s masterful courtroom strategies and vividly portrays the high-profile personalities involved, as well as the subtleties of judicial corruption. A reflective foreword by Justice Stevens himself looks back at the case and how it influenced his career.
Now the subject of the documentary Unexpected Justice: The Rise of John Paul Stevens, this fascinating chapter of political history offers a revealing portrait of the early career of a Supreme Court justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the hot summer of 1969, two judges from the Illinois State Supreme Court were accused of accepting gifts in exchange for a favorable verdict in a pending case. For the special commission set up to look into the charges, the chief investigator was a relatively unknown attorney named John Paul Stevens. As Manaster demonstrates in this well-researched (though overly lawyerly) account of the scandal, the case made Stevens famous and eventually propelled him all the way toward the U.S. Supreme Court. Manaster, a then-novice lawyer who worked on the commission, meticulously recounts both the unfolding of the scandal in the press and Stevens's probe. He then guides the reader through the many ins and outs of Stevens's arguments in the public hearings (ultimately, Stevens proved misconduct and both judges resigned). Unfortunately, this is dry material mainly of interest to legal scholars and historians. Manaster does provide some drama, as when Stevens forces one of the judges to confess that he used his influence to try and enroll his son in the National Guard and keep him out of Vietnam. But moments like this are rare in a book that reads too much like a summary of newspaper articles and court transcripts, instead of the compelling first-person narrative it could have been. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is its implicit criticism of Kenneth Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton; both Manaster and Stevens himself (in an enlightening foreword) make stark comparisons between the two cases. (Manaster says that Stevens ran a short-term, narrowly focused, and bipartisan investigation, in contrast to Starr). 20 b&w photos not seen by PW.
