Books like The Highest Tribute — picked by fans

This creative book showcases Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her frequent dissents from the Court's majority opinions. Beginning as a girl, Ruth often disagreed with other people's expectations. Using her strong-mindedness and intelligence and hard work, she excelled in college and law school, eventually overcoming prejudices against her as a woman and a Jew to become a law professor, a lawyer, and a judge. Author Debby Levy describes Ruth Bader Ginsburg's groundbreaking work as a lawyer seeking equality for men and women, including her numerous arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. And in discussing Justice Ginsburg's own tenure on the Supreme Court, Levy highlights Ruth's friendship with her political opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia. This book offers readers a three-dimensional profile of an iconic Justice.

Written by sitting United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Turning Pages tells the inspiring story of the author's early life. Justice Sotomayor's beautiful spirit shines through as she recounts her early struggles to learn English, her fear of the daily injections needed to control her diabetes, and how she overcame these and other challenges. Sotomayor credits her love of books and reading for her many accomplishments. As an added bonus, the book includes plenty of personal photographs, showing scenes and people from the author's childhood, family, and friends. This is a lovely, personal, uplifting work—and not at all the celebrity book you might expect.

This picture book tells the story of Hamilton v. Alabama, a lesser-known U.S. Supreme Court ruling on behalf of Miss Mary Hamilton. Mary Hamilton, a Black civil rights activist arrested for her protests against segregation, demanded in a court hearing that she be addressed as "Miss Hamilton," rather than by her first name. This courtesy was extended to white people but often not to Blacks. When she refused to respond to "Mary," the judge held her in contempt. The NAACP took the case to the United States Supreme Court, which reversed in a 1964 order. Powerful poetic text and art by the talented mother-son Boston Weatherford team puts Mary's demand for respect into its historical and social context.

First of all, isn't that an awesome title? This narrative is a child-appropriate and compelling description of Mildred and Richard Loving and their path to the Supreme Court. The two got married in D.C. in 1958, when interracial marriage was illegal in their home state of Virginia. Returning home after the wedding, they were arrested, jailed, and told to leave the state. They took their case to court arguing that Virginia's ban on interracial marriage violated the Constitution, and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. As described in the back matter, the creators of this book themselves have an interracial marriage. An author's note reflects on their lives and their perspective on the Lovings' story. 

Constance Baker Motley’s role within the Civil Rights Movement had not received the recognition it deserved until Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s Civil Rights Queen. Brown-Nagin reconstructs Motley’s life and pushes readers to consider the activist and legal career of the first Black woman appointed as a federal judge. As a writer who is especially interested in studying Black working-class women, I appreciate the author’s close attention to how Motley’s life from a working-class background to her position as a judge of the Southern District of New York.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to fully understand the century-long struggle after the Civil War to end legally-sanctioned discrimination against Black Americans. Prof. Klarman provides a richly detailed account of that century-long struggle, an account that describes the legal battles that took place in individual states and puts them in the context of the larger national debate. The book requires some effort on the reader's part, but the story that Klarman tells of the U.S. Supreme Court's gradual turn against segregation and its clashes with Southern state lawmakers and courts is ultimately a deeply moving one. 

More than a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott, a schoolteacher named Elizabeth Jennings did the same on a streetcar in New York City. Her act of courage didn’t lead to a mass movement, but it did lead to a court case—which she won with the help of her lawyer, future U.S. president Chester A. Arthur.

I chose this book because it’s so important to recall that segregation wasn’t only in the South, and that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s built on a long history of resistance going back to the first slave ships that arrived on America’s shores.

This novel is a little outside of my usual genre, but Steve Berry never disappoints.

The reason I like this one is because Berry weaves so much factual detail about the real Amber Room’s creation and theft into his fictional suspense plot. Overall, he is really good at blending authentic history with his fictional adventure plots – making it hard for a reader to know what is fact and what if fiction.

This book kept me turning pages (long after I should have stopped).

A prolific author, Picoult is particularly good at highlighting contemporary issues which defy easy answers. Nineteen Minutes describes a school shooting in a small New Hampshire town. The teenager who committed the crime began as a young boy who wanted only to fit in. When that proved impossible, he endeavored not to stand out. Finally he could not accept a life where he was not seen. However, no one – not his classmates, his parents, the police, or the members of the legal system – has a pure motive in the actions which follow.  

Earl Warren was one of our most consequential Chief Justices.

Serving from 1953 to 1969, he led the way on many country-changing decisions. He deftly forged the Court’s unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education and oversaw other landmark cases, establishing one-person, one-vote for our democracy; banning prayer in public schools; and presiding over a criminal justice revolution, including the famous Miranda decision that gave us warnings that every American knows by heart.

Jim Newton’s lively biography is indispensable in understanding these momentous developments, as well as the intriguing character of Warren, who also served as California’s Governor and the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee in 1948.

Perhaps more than any other Justice, Warren launched the modern era of our jurisprudence.