Former Marshall clerks discuss him on Broadway

Three former Thurgood Marshall law clerks joined actor Laurence Fishburne on the stage after yesterday's performance of the one-man play Thurgood. The former clerks are all Yale Law Professors: Owen Fiss, Stephen Carter and Dan Kahan. Dan Slater of the Wall Street Journal reports:

Fiss, who clerked for Marshall in 1964 when he was still on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, begged to differ with Fishburne’s assessment, but only to congratulate him further. He said the show was more than an intimate portrayal of Marshall’s life, that it also showed Marshall’s unique position in American history as one of the drivers of what Professor Fiss called “the Second Reconstruction.” Fiss said that, despite some rights being “savaged by the Rehnquist court,” we can now look back on an era that Marshall helped shepherd into existence, an era that has seen the rise of Marshall’s ideals and a new black middle class. Fiss said he thought this so-called Second Reconstruction was now at an end, though he and Fishburne agreed that there was still a lot of work to be done in the slums of cities like New Orleans, Baltimore and New York.