Books, Federal Judges

All Falling Faiths: An Interview With Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

Judge Wilkinson discusses his new book, a meditation on the 1960s and their legacy.

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All Falling Faiths by Judge J Harvie Wilkinson IIITo regular readers of Above the Law, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III needs no introduction. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit since 1984, Judge Wilkinson is one of the most distinguished and highly respected members of the federal judiciary. Not surprisingly, he has been mentioned frequently over the years as a possible nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court (and interviewed with President Bush for a spot on the Court in 2005).

Readers of ATL might also recall Judge Wilkinson’s status as a leading feeder judge. Over his more than three decades on the federal bench, he has sent many of his clerks into prestigious Supreme Court clerkships, a reflection of how much the justices value his opinion.[1]

Judge Wilkinson is also a gifted prose stylist — and not just in terms of his judicial opinions. He’s a former journalist and the author of several books, including Serving Justice: A Supreme Court Clerk’s View and Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance.

I recently had the pleasure of reading his latest work, All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a deeply insightful, heartfelt, and superbly written book, in which Judge Wilkinson reflects on living through the ’60s and draws important lessons from those years — lessons that are sadly all too relevant today. As George Will put it, this “elegant new memoir… explains why today’s distemper was incubated in that ‘burnt and ravaged forest of a decade.'”

I also had the privilege of interviewing Judge Wilkinson about the book. What follows is a (lightly edited and condensed) write-up of our conversation.

DL: Congratulations on the publication of All Falling Faiths, which is a wonderful work — powerful, persuasive, and a genuine pleasure to read. What gave you the idea for this project?

JHW: I thought I had left the 1960s behind for good, but these past few years have been a flashback. The 1960s had only gone into remission; now they’re storming back. This book was written for love of country and out of dismay at the institutions that the decade diminished and the values that the ‘60s stole away. So it became imperative to recall in the most intimate sense what those tumultuous years were like and to implore future generations not to repeat them.

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But I couldn’t just lecture people about the 1960s. There’s been too much shouting and screaming about them already. It has to be hand-in-hand personal.

DL: Your book is quite personal, and it crosses genres in such interesting ways — part memoir, part history, part reflection on current affairs. How did that come about?

JHW: I had all these little fragments lying around the house, and I thought I would reconstruct them, first for my children and grandchildren. I knew all too little about my grandparents and nothing at all about my great-grandparents. The emptiness has haunted me. We should each want to know something about the people who helped put us on this earth.

So it started out as pure memoir, but I found I couldn’t leave it at that. It’s not possible to write about the 1950s and ‘60s without examining their impact on the present day.

Memoirs are inescapably about recall, summoning up people I dearly loved and a period of American history which I often did not love at all. Recall makes you laugh; it makes you cry; it often finds you smiling through your tears. It helps to explain things about yourself and your country that you never really understood before.

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Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III

DL: The book is beautifully written, especially the parts in which you reminisce about your childhood in the South and your college years at Yale. But these events took place decades ago — how did you go about reconstructing them for purposes of All Falling Faiths?

JHW: It’s all about capturing moments. Some folks do that in photographs and on film. If a moment seems precious or meaningful to me, I try to capture it in words before it slips away.

DL: So did you maintain a journal or diary during the periods you write about? Or did you dig up old photos or appointment books or other materials from your past?

JHW: When I was homesick at summer camp or boarding school, or simply downcast, I found a diary good therapy. But otherwise, no. I can’t keep a diary going for the same reason I haven’t run a marathon—lack of stamina. The book was really a stop-and-go exercise that somehow managed to stretch out over fifty years. It’s a mix of contemporaneous jottings and pure memory.

DL: How would you describe your writing process? For example, is there a particular time of day when you do your personal writing as opposed to your judicial writing?

JHW: Judicial writing is a craft where the formal strictures of the law help to bring out the beauty of it. As much as I love legal writing, there are times (mainly nights and weekends) when I need to take leave of statutory text and standards of review and just gallop over open ground. And as much as I love my colleagues, there are times when I need to write without having to convince one (or preferably two) other people I’m not crazy.

DL: I think the book will interest a wide range of readers for a wide range of reasons — but did you have a particular reader or group of readers in mind when you were writing it?

JHW: The audience is anyone who loves America. All of us can still help to repair the damage that long-ago decade did to the spirit of tolerance in education, to the stability of family bonds and units, to the rule of law, to our sense of America as our home, to our capacity for national unity even in times of crisis, and to the sustenance we derive from the practice of religious faith. It’s also important to recognize, however, that the 1960s did great good and helped to broaden America’s embrace of all its citizens, not just some. I hope that by the end of the book, each reader will come at least to appreciate the other side of the enduring ‘60s argument.

I believe the generation of the Sixties has been given one last chance to get it right. We can help upcoming generations learn from our experience. And we can devote our later years to bringing together the nation we did so much in our youth to drive apart. We owe our beloved country at least this much, before we leave Shakespeare’s stage and life itself for good.

DL: Well stated, Your Honor. Thank you for taking the time to chat, and thank you for writing such a timely and important book.

[1] Fun fact: one of those Wilkinson-turned-SCOTUS clerks, Jeffrey Wall (October Term 2004 / Thomas), just picked up the job of principal deputy solicitor general (and therefore acting solicitor general, pending confirmation of Noel Francisco). Jeff Wall must have made a very favorable impression on his former boss; Wall is married to one of the judge’s two children, Porter Wilkinson Wall. She is a legal luminary in her own right, a UVA Law grad and former Supreme Court clerk (to Chief Justice Roberts) who now serves as Chief of Staff to the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution.

(Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book, and all links to books on Amazon are affiliate links.)

All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s [Amazon (affiliate link)]
An Adult Voice amid Pandemic Childishness [National Review]

DBL square headshotDavid Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].

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