SUPREME PRESSURE

Li, a legal historian and journalist, examines the failed nomination of a Depression-era Supreme Court justice.

As the descendent of one of North Carolina’s most distinguished families, John J. Parker’s ancestors included Revolutionary War veterans, two governors (one was also a U.S. senator), and one of the first six justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. When Parker himself was nominated by President Herbert Hoover to the Supreme Court in 1930, most journalists and political insiders assumed his confirmation was a given. Yet, despite his pedigree and tenure as young judge, not to mention his connections to some of the South’s most powerful politicians, Parker’s nomination would go down as one of the most hotly contested failed appointments in history. Nominated during the peak of Jim Crow discrimination in the South and the nascent economic collapse associated with the Great Depression, Parker confronted intense opposition from Black civil rights activists and labor organizers. As a member of the Republican Party’s “lily-white” southern faction, Parker had previously declared his support of segregation and laws that severely limited the ability of Black Americans to vote. He had also taken legal stances against the United Mine Workers of America in favor of coal companies. These positions ignited a firestorm of pressure within the Republican Party, and Parker’s nomination would be rejected in a close vote. While the campaign to take down Parker is reported in fascinating detail, what truly stands out in this book are the connections Li makes between this ideological battle of 1930 to the later politicalization of Supreme Court nominees from Robert Bork to Brett Kavanaugh; the author argues that Parker set a precedent that would define nominations across going forward. An assistant managing editor of the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal, host of the Legal Rebels Podcast, and author of a book on Richard Nixon’s electoral strategy, Li blends an absorbing, accessible writing style with solid research based largely on archival and primary sources.

A well-researched, profoundly relevant story of a failed judicial nomination.