John Barrett
Professor John Q. Barrett’s essay, “No College, No Prior Clerkship: How Jim Marsh Became Justice Jackson’s Law Clerk,” is a chapter in the book Of Courtiers and Kings: More Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and their Justices (University of Virginia Press, Todd C. Peppers & Clare Cushman, eds., 2015).
Barrett’s chapter (abstract here) tells how Justice Robert H. Jackson, after hiring top Harvard Law School graduates as his first three law clerks, in 1947 improbably hired James M. Marsh, a night school graduate of Temple Law School who had never attended college or clerked for another judge.
In his Foreword to the book, Justice John Paul Stevens notes his friendship with Jim Marsh—Stevens was a law clerk to Justice Wiley Rutledge while Marsh was clerking for Justice Jackson.
In the Spring 2016 issue of Temple Esq., its law alumni magazine, the lead story reports on Professor Barrett’s chapter on Jim Marsh. Tony Mauro, writing in the National Law Journal about this new book, also highlighted Barrett’s chapter.
Professor Barrett is biographer of Justice Robert H. Jackson and writer of The Jackson List.
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