Justice Brennan said he was one of the very few geniuses he ever met.

He was definitely a genius.

And that permitted him to do all of his court work and have this second life.

Welcome back to Amicus Slate's podcast about the courts and the law.

I am Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover these things at Slate.

And this is our very last in the summer book series featuring writers and books.

We may have missed in the hustle and bustle of the daily news cycle all year.

When next we meet, we will be on the downhill run to the first Monday in October and a

brand spanking new Supreme Court term.

Thank you for hanging out with us and with some really cool books and guests this summer.

And thank you to our Slate Plus members who support all the work that we do and who have only a couple of weeks to go until they get more awesome Amicus exclusive bonus segments with me and Mark Joseph Stern.

And if you are not a Slate Plus member yet, you can find out more at slate.com slash amicus plus.

But back to the business of our annual summer book club, today's guest is

Judge Margaret McEwen. Her new book is Citizen Justice, the environmental legacy of William

O. Douglas. Judge McEwen profiled Justice Douglas in part because he was the most controversial

member of the Supreme Court. The guy survived two impeachments, married four women, lived larger than life, and spent 36 years on the bench. But he was also a crusader for environmental rights in ways that blurred all sorts of lines between judging and lobbying and political activism.

It feels wonderfully on the nose to be thinking about some of these issues right now, but we wanted to be clear.

We'll be talking about those issues by sticking to the history, because though we sometimes forget when we're talking about the Supreme Court, judges and justices are bound by ethical

canons that preclude them from discussing hot-button political issues of the day, which means,

dear listeners, Judge McEwen really cannot discuss current scandals and concerns. Judge Margaret

McEwen has served for almost 25 years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an affiliated scholar at the Center for the American West at Stanford University, and she is jurist in residence at the University of San Diego School of Law.

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