Bench & Bar January/February 2026

PRESIDENT'S PAGE

T his past October, my alma mater, Centre College, installed and ded icated a statue of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. Created by nationally renowned Louisville-based sculptor, Ed Hamilton, the college asserts that the installation symbolically captures “the story of Harlan’s dissents, which may not have won the day, but have stood the test of time.” In that Harlan and I are both Centre College alumni and members of the same fraternity, I decided to read up on him to determine if his life offered insights for lawyers practicing over 150 years later. Although times have certainly changed, I do see Harlan as an inspiration to today’s Kentucky lawyers. Harlan is a shining example of what I will call the “Lawyer Statesman.” That is a lawyer

skilled in his craft, advancing dissent ing opinions to seek positive change, and acting with moral authority derived from their knowledge of the law. Although the word statesman implies political leadership, I see it more broadly as describing one who uses the law to create meaningful political and legal change. And such change often requires one to dissent from the majority’s views. Born 1833 in Boyle County, Harlan later attended Centre College. He studied law at Transylvania University. He served as a Col onel in the Union Army. He practiced law in Frankfort and Louisville. He was deeply involved in politics and was appointed as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1877. Despite the fact that Harlan and his family had owned

slaves, and that he once strongly supported slavery, Harlan’s views evolved, becoming an early expression of what is now uniformly accepted: all persons, no matter their differ ences, are equal under the law. (Thanks to the Brandeis School of Law, which has an excellent online history of Justice Harlan). Over his career on the Supreme Court, Harlan dissented on a number of significant cases involving civil rights with the most famous being his dissent in Plessy v. Fer guson , 163 U.S. 537 (1896). “Plessy argued that enforced segregation in theoretically separate-but-equal accommodations com promised the principle of legal equality and marked Black people as inferior. The Court majority disagreed, declaring the law constitutional while saying it stamped Black people with ‘a badge of inferiority’ only if ‘the colored race chooses to put that

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Photos provided for publication from Centre College.

january/february 2026