In a new biography of Harlan, The Great Dissenter, Peter S. Canellos—an editor at Politico and the author of a biography of Ted Kennedy—says that Americans don’t yet fully appreciate this personal and political transformation, if they even recognize Harlan’s name at all.

Mr. Canellos rescues these cases from law-school casebooks and situates them in American history.

Although John Harlan is the book’s titular protagonist, Robert Harlan is its most intriguing character—on his own terms, not merely as a vehicle for understanding John’s conscience on race. The author’s affection for both men emerges in his writing, which at times edges close to excusing John’s less enlightened views (including his participation in unanimous opinions excluding Chinese Americans from equal standing). Still, overall this is a sensitive and smart excavation of two men’s entwined lives .. 'There are silences in American history,' Canellos writes in the book’s introduction. Hidden by one such silence is the truth about what happened to Black Americans in the years after Reconstruction.

A sympathetic and well-written new biography.

Instead of the definitive say on Harlan’s legacy, this biography offers thoughtful contributions to these ongoing debates and insights into the principles shaping the justice’s thinking, bringing us closer to comprehending his unsettled legacy and, more tellingly, casting a light on why it has morphed over time.

... a sensitive and balanced telling.

In this meticulously researched and acutely analytical biography, Canellos offers a nuanced portrait of the Supreme Court justice whose arguments in some of the most consequential cases in American jurisprudence earned him the titular sobriquet, 'The Great Dissenter'..

Biographer Canellos intertwines in this original and eye-opening biography the lives of Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan and his rumored half-brother, Robert Harlan, who was born a slave.

Canellos, the former executive editor of Politico, delivers the riveting story of a courageous Kentucky lawyer who initiated significant challenges to anti–civil rights measures during an era of ubiquitous bigotry.