A NOT SO BRIEF RECESS.(The Talk of the Town)

Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., became known, in his thirty-four years on the Supreme Court, as perhaps the country's foremost advocate of free speech and public access to information. Before his retirement from the court, in 1990, he sought to extend this legacy by donating his papers to the Library of Congress and cooperating with an authorized biographer. The results, six years after his death, in 1997, may not be exactly what Brennan had in mind: thanks to the dawdling of his biographer, much of what he left behind has remained hidden from view, as inaccessible to the public as information can be.

Brennan was appointed to the court in 1956. As a result of various agreements, all of his legal papers through the 1970 term are available to the public. Many of the rest, covering the years that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has been on the Court, are restricted. This has rendered off limits an especially coveted set of documents known as Brennan's case histories, in which he and his clerks reviewed the behind-the-scenes strategizing that produced each session's most important decisions, such as Roe v. Wade, in 1973. (Researchers can apply to see the case histories, but opinions vary about how easy it is to get permission.) Brennan also directed the Library of Congress not to allow access to his personal correspondence and files until 2017.

There is one exception to these restrictions. To the frustration of other scholars, Brennan arranged for his biographer, Stephen Wermiel, to have exclusive access to everything in the collection, including the correspondence. Brennan gave Wermiel sixty-six interviews and had his clerks give many more. "Steve told me that no one was allowed to see the case histories except him," said Dennis Hutchinson, a professor at the University of Chicago law school who recently published a biography of Justice Byron White. "I'd love to see them. Anybody who writes about the Supreme Court would."

In a way, the problem isn't so much Wermiel's access as what little he has managed to make of it. Brennan selected Wermiel in 1986, when Wermiel was covering the court for the Wall Street Journal. Seventeen years later, there's no book, and Wermiel says that he is no longer even actively ...