Courtesy of this post at SCOTUSblog, I discovered this poster of the visual history of the Supreme Court available at a website called Timeplots.
The creator's intent was for the poster to:
display[ ] the full sweep of American federal judicial history from 1789 to 2009. It combines biographical information on every Supreme Court justice with a visualization of the influence of U.S. presidents and their political parties on the Court over time, and includes vote counts and summaries of landmark cases.
It's a nice poster. I was disappointed to see only one habeas case featured - Gideon. Well, at least there's one and that's a big one. There are some criminal cases, too - Mapp, Miranda, Furman and Gregg. Of all the categories, the criminal cases represented the smallest number. I think it may be too soon, but some of the more recent cases, such as Apprendi/Blakely and Crawford, may end up ranking pretty high up there in terms of impact on criminal law. Maybe if the poster is updated 30 years from now, those cases will make the cut. I actually kind of think that, of the past 30 years, Strickland has had the most ginormous impact on criminal law, but it's not a particularly sexy case.
Got me thinking -- what are the biggest habeas cases? I actually am kind of disappointed that I can't really put any out there that come close to belonging on the chart. There certainly are many that are important to habeas law, but aren't really watershed-type cases that would breakthrough into mainstream thought. For example, there's Brown v. Allen,344 U.S. 443 (1953), that ushered in the modern habeas practice. But not many people are too familiar with it and the AEDPA kind of limited the continuing significance of Brown. Then there are the important cases that set up the procedural rules (Fay v. Noia, Wainwright v. Sykes, Harris v. Reed, Coleman v. Thompson, Murray v. Carrier), but no one outside of the habeas world would consider those cases to be important (even though in federal practice they are pretty important). Then there are the class of cases like Gideon that had an important criminal law holding only it came in a habeas context. Obviously, those will, for the most part, pre-date the AEDPA.
I may come back and update this post with further thoughts on important habeas cases. I think it's an interesting challenge.
Maybe Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004)?
Posted by: Al O'Connor | December 22, 2009 at 09:56 AM