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The Conscience of the Court celebrates the work of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who served on the United States Supreme Court for thirty-four years (1956–1990).

Stephen L. Sepinuck and Mary Pat Treuthart introduce and present selected judicial opinions written by Justice Brennan on issues involving personal freedom, civil liberties, and equality. Brennan is ranked by many as the best writer ever to have served on the Supreme Court, and his written opinions depict real people, often in desperate, emotional situations. Remarkable for their clarity of analysis, for their eloquence, and for their forcefulness and persuasiveness, his opinions demonstrate that judicial thought need not be a proprietary enclave of lawyers or the intellectual elite.

The extended excerpts selected by Sepinuck and Treuthart highlight Brennan's approach to judicial decision making. Concerned always with how each decision would actually affect people's lives, Brennan possessed a rare quality of empathy. In Brennan, the editors note, "people and groups who lacked influence in society—Communists and flag burners, children and foreigners, criminal defendants and racial minorities"—found a champion they could count on "to listen to their causes and judge them unmoved by the passions of the politically powerful."

In their introduction to each opinion, the editors provide background facts, discuss how the excerpted opinion transformed the law or otherwise fit into the realm of constitutional jurisprudence, and delve into Justice Brennan's judicial philosophy, his method of constitutional interpretation, and the language he used.

In recognition of the bicentennial of the Constitution of the United States, former chief justice Warren E. Burger, Justice Antonin Scalia, ACLU president Norman Dorsen, and others delivered papers at the first annual DeWitt Wallace Conference on the Liberal Arts, held at Macalester College, St. Paul.

Joining some of the best legal minds in America were novelist John Edgar Wideman, chemist Harry B. Gray, historian Mary Beth Norton, and psychiatrist and social psychologist Robert Jay Lifton.

Opening the conference and this book, former chief Justice Burger emphasizes the daring of those who drafted the Constitution. Justice Scalia, noting the great reduction in curbs to freedom of expression since World War I, points out that the proliferation of freedom has forced courts to distinguish between types of expression.

Although the views expressed in these essays differ widely, opinion concerning the major issue falls into two definite camps: Burger, Scalia, and Dorsen contend that freedom of expression depends on the legal structure for survival; Wideman, Gray, Lifton, and Norton maintain that social forces determine freedom of expression.

The Freedom to Remember examines contemporary literary revisions of slavery in the United States by black women writers. The narratives at the center of this book include: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J. California Cooper’s Family, and Lorene Cary’s The Price of a Child.

Recent studies have investigated these works only from the standpoint of victimization. Angelyn Mitchell changes the conceptualization of these narratives, focusing on the theme of freedom, not slavery, defining these works as “liberatory narratives.” These works create a space to problematize the slavery/freedom dichotomy from which contemporary black women writers have the “safe” vantage point to reveal aspects of enslavement that their ancestors could not examine. The nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, by contrast, was written to aid the cause of abolition by revealing the unspeakable realitiesof slavery. Mitchell shows how the liberatory narrative functions to emancipate its readers from the legacies of slavery in American society: by facilitating a deeper discussion of the issues and by making them new through illumination and interrogation.

The Interval of Freedom was first published in 1960. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

When Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago was published in Europe and America in 1957 and 1958, the Western world was astonished and elated. But Doctor Zhivago is not the only significant literary work to come out of Soviet Russia recently. During four extraordinary years, 1954 to 1957, from Stalin's death to the aftermath of the Hungarian revolt, Soviet Russian authors were able to express their minds with unusual freedom. In this volume Professor Gibian examines various revelations made in Soviet literature during this interval of comparative freedom.

Nearly a score of contemporary Soviet writers are considered in detail. The authors and their works are grouped according to three major subjects to which Soviet writers have devoted much attention: science, love and sex, and the literary villain or "negative" character. Works of the following writers are discussed in depth: Alexander Bek, Leonid Leonov, Daniel Granin, Venyamin Kaverin, Vladimir Dudintsev, Semen Kirsanov, S. Aleshin, Viktor Nekrasov, Nikolai Pogodin, Galina Nikolaeva, Alexander Korneichuk, Alexander Shtein, Alexander Volodin, Nikolai Gorbunov, Nikolai Zhdanov, and Alexander Yahin. An entire chapter is devoted to Doctor Zhivago. In an introductory chapter, the author provides a survey of literary developments during the interval of freedom. In a final chapter he draws conclusions about the nature of the thinking of Soviet literary intelligentsia, comparing it with Western literary thought. The book is illuminating from social and political as well as literary viewpoints.