The Library of Congress has posted a webcast of Professor Paul Baier’s Coolidge Auditorium production of his play, “Father Chief Justice,” on its webpage and on YouTube. It features a remarkable cast of players, including SCOTUS blogger Tom Goldstein as Justice Brandeis, Ronald Flagg, President D.C. Bar as Justice Harlan, Charles Cooper, Cooper & Kirk, as Chief Justice White, New Orleans’s Don Hoffman, an original cast member, reprises his moustachioed Holmes in Act III, and Jacob A. Stein, an inimitable Washington, D.C. trial lawyer at age 86, plays Holmes at 90 in a scene called “The Kind Voice of Friends.”
Roberta Shaffer, Law Librarian of Congress, welcomes you and plays Fanny Holmes.
Professor Baier plays his signature role as Professor Richard Henry Jesse, a close personal friend of Edward Douglass White. Baier wrote the play from history.
The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society, Georgetown University Law Center, the Louisiana Bar Foundation, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana Historical Society sponsored the event. Aspen Publishers, Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, and LexisNexis generously underwrote the production.
“Father Chief Justice” has been in production for fourteen years since its premiere in Thibodaux on March 8 (Holmes’s birthday), 1997.
“Boston is the next venue,” said Professor Baier. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
