Foreword: The Books of Justices

For this Michigan Law Review issue devoted to recently published books about law, I thought it would be interesting to see what books made an appearance in the past year’s work of the Supreme Court. I catalogued every citation to every book in those forty opinions in order to see what patterns emerged: what books the justices cited, which justices cited which books, and what use they made of the citations. To begin with, I should define what I mean by “books". For the purposes of this Foreword, I excluded some types of reading matter that may have a book-like appearance or that others might view as a book: government reports and statistical compilations, including the Federal Sentencing Guidelines; the Model Penal Code; the Congressional Record; the Federal Register; and other current compilations of statutes or regulatory codes.

(I include some older compilations as primary source material, e.g., a volume of the Vermont State Papers 1779– 1786, published in 1823 and cited by Chief Justice Roberts.) I also excluded monographs, databases, and reference materials residing entirely on the Internet.