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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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....

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