Of the 111 justices who have served on the Supreme Court, only a select few managed to see a legal horizon far beyond the view of their contemporaries.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was traveling by train to Washington, D.C., one morning nearly a century ago when a conductor asked for his ticket. Holmes searched high and low for it until the conductor reassured him, “Don’t worry about your ticket, Mr. Holmes. We all know who you are. When you get to your destination, you can find it and just mail it to us.”

“My dear man, the problem is not my ticket,” quipped Holmes, who was renowned for his quick wit. “The problem is…where am I going?”

We face a similar guessing game as a nation every time a new Supreme Court justice is chosen. The president and other officials involved in the selection process can only speculate what route a new appointee will follow during a lifetime tenure on the Court, much less what lasting impact he or she might have on interpretation of our laws. And predicting whether any justice will achieve a measure of greatness is a crapshoot.

Sonia Sotomayor is no exception. When President Barack Obama put her up for Senate confirmation this summer, he touted her “empathy” and potential for blazing a new historical trail as the first Latina justice. She has been widely compared to Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice, and Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice, both of whom made history by breaking racial and gender barriers. But neither Marshall nor O’Connor are generally viewed as intellectual leaders on the Court. Marshall brought a deep sense of social justice to the Court’s deliberations, but he was not equally known for his contribution to legal theory and doctrine—at least, no more than the vast majority of his predecessors or successors. O’Connor virtually functioned as a court of one—the consistent swing vote on a Court rigidly divided in many areas by a 4-4 split—but will not be remembered for the depth or consistency of her opinions. Even though she often dictated the outcome of cases, she did so with insular and sometimes conflicting rationales.

The most notable trend in recent decades has been for presidents to put forward nominees who have empty files: impressive academic and judicial résumés combined with a sparse history of controversial speeches or writings that might be turned against them during the confirmation process. Such for­mulaic selections reflect the vagaries of our political system, but also our discomfort with people who are creative thinkers and can’t be easily pigeonholed as either judicial activists or strict constructionists. Even though America has the deepest pool of lawyers in the world, if genius is found on the modern Court it is largely accidental.

There is no standard profile for the selection of great justices. However, close examination of the records of the 111 justices who have served on the Court reveals that a select few managed to see a legal horizon far beyond the view of their contemporaries, often espousing views that would not reflect majoritarian values for decades. The nine justices featured on the pages that follow all exhibited an ability to rise above conventional thinking and prejudices and epitomize what constitutes the right stuff on the Supreme Court.

 3 Game Changers
One of the primary measures of greatness on the Supreme Court is the impact a justice’s decisions have on the society at large. John Marshall, Charles Evan Hughes and Earl Warren all sat on the bench during transformative periods in American history and the social and political consequences of their decisions reverberated for generations.

John Marshall
Chief Justice 1801 to 1835
Marshall authored the most important American judicial opinion of all time: Marbury v. Madison (1803), which established the supremacy of the Court in legal judgments. He also issued a series of decisions involving the balance of power between the federal government and the states that laid the legal foundation for the young republic. “A hush falls upon us even now as we listen to his words,” Justice Benjamin Cardozo wrote more than two centuries later.

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