This Essay examines the events that led to Dean Emeritus Bruce Jacob being the recipient of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ (NACDL) prestigious Champion of Indigent Defense Award. Dean Jacob represented the State of Florida in the Gideon v. Wainwright case, arguing for adherence to Betts v. Brady, which did not provide the right to counsel for indigent state defendants absent special circumstances. After arguing Gideon before the United States Supreme Court, Dean Jacob spent much of his career advocating for indigent defendants’ rights to effective assistance of counsel. Although some may find an irony in these two roles, this Essay notes the symmetry when looking at Dean Jacob as a true “minister of justice.”

Bruce Jacob is too often identified with just one case: Gideon v. Wainwright. Gideon, however, was not Bruce’s only Supreme Court case, let alone his only criminal case. Bruce worked tirelessly for the rights of criminal defendants throughout his distinguished legal and academic career. Kaufman v. United States, the subject of this Article, is just one of those “other” cases. The tale of Harold Kaufman, his almost‐ comical crime spree, his redemption, and Bruce’s involvement is the stuff of Hollywood movies. For those of us who know Bruce, it is just another snapshot from a dedicated academician’s wonderful life.

Anyone who has spent time in the presence of Clarence Thomas off the bench is sure to feel the contradiction: He seems such a genuinely nice man, but this side of his personality never ever shows in his judicial opinions. A good case can be made that the attitudes that constitute personality are fundamentally important in a Supreme Court justice, whose decisions in close cases (and almost all of those in the Supreme Court are) usually turn on intangibles like reverence for the Founders or sympathy for the little guy. In person, Thomas exudes such sympathy, but it never shows in his opinions—why not? Part of the answer lies in his lifelong affinity with Bigger Thomas, the protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Bigger yearned for a dogma that would help him understand his role in the perplexing world, and, in a far more sophisticated way, so does Justice Thomas. He finds that dogma in an originalism so severe that even its protagonists question his version. Yet he persists, even though this makes him less and less relevant to the Court’s continuing dialogue. There seems no way out of this blind alley, and Justice Thomas may end his days as professionally bitter and burnt out as Richard Wright was after a career that never again reached the heights of his early successes. But a hint of salvation may come from the example of another embittered black man, Malcolm X, as portrayed by the director Spike Lee. In the years immediately before Malcolm’s assassination, he seemed to soften his dogma and to allow more range to the benign aspects of his personality. Such a turn would make Clarence Thomas a better justice—but it does not seem to have much chance of happening.

Judges must decide cases without regard to fear of public reaction or personal consequences. This Article explores a particular act of judicial courage: the decision by United States District Judge William Augustus Bootle in January 1961 to order the desegregation of the University of Georgia. The Article tells the story of how a white southern federal judge, whose background included no evidence of a particular interest in civil rights, found himself in the center of a social and political firestorm when Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter made their case to become the first African‐American students in the one hundred and seventy‐five‐year history of the University of Georgia. The Article draws upon contemporary accounts of the events and extensive archival evidence to evoke a sense of the courage it took for Judge Bootle to decide that case solely upon the law and the facts, and it analyzes Judge Bootle’s decision as a matter of judicial craft.

The Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.” This fundamental Right to Counsel is essential to the functioning of an adversarial criminal justice system, ensuring that defendants have the means to assert their other rights and are not otherwise disadvantaged by their lack of finances. In its landmark 1963 decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, which fully applied the Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel to the states, the United States Supreme Court attempted to level the criminal playing field once and for all by ensuring indigent defendants charged with a crime have an attorney to render effective assistance of counsel. Yet more than fifty years later, the parity promised in Gideon has never been fully achieved. Persistent and numerous threats to the functioning of indigent defense systems, chiefly the politically‐derived issues of underfunding and excessive caseloads, have made indigent criminal defense a field under siege, in which most defenders work under conditions that make it impossible to satisfy the Sixth Amendment. This Article considers the current state and trajectory of the Right to Counsel under the assumption that effective, permanent efforts to achieve nationwide implementation will not realistically occur anytime soon. The Article focuses on proposing short‐term, ground‐level, smaller‐scale procedural optimizations that state public defense systems can make on their own to provide better service within the constraints of today’s hostile political environment. It explores the development of the Right to Counsel, analyzing significant past and potential reform efforts and why, for all the progress that has been made, full implementation of the Right still remains distant. The Article suggests several potential ways public defenders, state courts, bar associations, and other parties can improve defendants’ access to justice even without additional funding, a breakthrough ruling, or any legislative or executive action.