The Heist
More Perfect
WNYC Studios
4.8 • 14.7K Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2017
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Supreme Court may not have been conceptualized as a co-equal branch of the federal government, but it became one as a result of the political maneuvering of Chief Justice John Marshall. The fourth (and longest-serving) chief justice was "a great lover of power," according to historian Jill Lepore, but he was also a great lover of secrecy. Marshall believed, in order for the justices to confer with each other candidly, their papers needed to remain secret in perpetuity. It was under this veil of secrecy that the biggest heist in the history of the Supreme Court took place.
The key voices:
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Jill Lepore, professor of American history at Harvard University
The key links:
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"The Great Paper Caper," The New Yorker (2014)
Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court justice 1939 to 1962
Leadership support for More Perfect is provided by The Joyce Foundation. Additional funding is provided by The Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation.
Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project in collaboration with the Legal Information Institute at Cornell.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Leadership support for More Perfect is provided by the Joyce Foundation. |
| 0:04.1 | This is More Perfect. I'm Chad Iplemrod. This week, a conversation about a mystery. |
| 0:09.5 | It's a mystery actually that's connected to one of my favorite stories we've done so far. |
| 0:13.2 | The political thicket. The political thicket. The court must not enter the political |
| 0:17.9 | thicket and the imagery of the thicket is that the deer very proudly with his new horns |
| 0:25.1 | goes into the thicket, gets entangled, and can never get out. |
| 0:31.5 | Frank Furrier's claim was, once the courts are in, there will be nothing beyond it, |
| 0:36.2 | and someday the courts will be forced to declare winners and losers of very high profile elections. |
| 0:43.5 | If you haven't heard this story, definitely hit pause right now. Go back in the feed, |
| 0:47.6 | find the story called political thicket. Listen to it is definitely one of my favorites. |
| 0:52.8 | It's essentially the story of a case that many people point to as being the first time that |
| 0:58.8 | the Supreme Court got into politics, sort of soiled themselves with politics, which |
| 1:04.3 | you can make a beeline from that moment to Bush v. Gore. That case, 1962, |
| 1:10.3 | it was so traumatic for the court that it literally broke two justices, |
| 1:17.2 | like shattered two human beings. And one of those two justices, Justice Felix Frank Furrier, |
| 1:24.1 | is at the center of the mystery we're about to tell you about. But just to give you a sense of who |
| 1:28.1 | he was, I'm going to play you a little clip from that earlier story. He was extremely smart. |
| 1:33.7 | Towering figure. But as a person, just as Frank, just as Frank Furrier, |
| 1:40.9 | he wasn't necessarily the nicest person. I heard that from everyone I talked to. |
| 1:45.8 | I always call him a banterem rooster. He was a difficult crusty figure. He was short, |
| 1:51.3 | and a little bit of a pouch on him. He was one of the most contescending, |
| 1:55.4 | egotistical of justices. So Justice Felix Frank Furrier, not the nicest guy, but |
... |
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