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A Conversation with author Cliff Sloan and Teresa Wynn Roseborough
Cliff Sloan’s latest book, The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made, examines the World War II era Supreme Court and their often intimate relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt.
By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice.
But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.
The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices—from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.
Join the Society for a Zoom conversation with Cliff Sloan and Teresa Wynn Roseborough on this exciting new book.
Cliff Sloan is a professor of constitutional law and criminal justice at Georgetown University Law Center. He has argued before the Supreme Court seven times. He has served in all three branches of the federal government, including as Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure, and is the author of The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court. His commentary on the Supreme Court and legal issues has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, and other publications, and on television and radio networks. He clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Teresa Roseborough is Executive Vice President and General Counsel at The Home Depot. Teresa’s prior legal experience includes government service as deputy assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice, law clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States, law clerk for Judge James Dickson Phillips of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and an employee of the Department of Defense in West Germany. Teresa was named one of 25 Influential Black Women in Business by The Network Journal and as one of America’s top black attorneys by Black Enterprise. Her civic involvement includes serving as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the U.S., co-chair of the board of directors of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and as a member of the Board of Overseers of the RAND Corporation Institute for Civil Justice. She serves on the Society’s Executive Committee.