The Supreme Court’s hearing on the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law has attracted a nearly unprecedented amount of interest, not only from individuals demonstrating on the court’s steps—or waiting in line literally for days for a seat inside—but from organizations either supporting or opposing the law. Apparently a record number of briefs have been filed—so-called amicus curiae, in which organizations provide historical and legal data to influence the process. As these briefs are processed by the court’s law clerks, we thought we would go to Todd C. Peppers and Artemus Ward, editors of In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices, with some of our questions about the preparation for this historic ruling.

This being the week of President’s Day, we thought we would ask one of our favorite authors, Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, about her recent reading on the third president.
Q: We at UVA Press, along with Maurizio Valsania, were delighted to learn that you were reading his latest book, The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment. How did you come to his work?

Gordon-Reed: My good friend Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia had read the book in manuscript and suggested I read it.

Q: Jefferson is well known as an enlightenment thinker. Did anything in Valsania’s book surprise you?

Gordon-Reed: Well, it’s such a fresh take on Jefferson. It moves beyond the “He was a man of contradictions” approach. That is true, but as Valsania shows, a lot of what Jefferson says and does hangs together.