Disorder in the American courts
Fifty years ago, Margaret H. Marshall was the teenage daughter of a chemist and a homemaker in Newcastle, South Africa. At a Radcliffe Day luncheon Friday, the now-retired chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recalled her childhood city as “a garden” in the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains. But she realized even then that the lush landscape of maize and dairy farms was also a garden of shadows, a childhood Eden within a South Africa in the grip of racial apartheid. The authorities and others worked to “protect and consolidate the power of the powerful” and uphold a race-dividing scheme “tethered by law,” Marshall told the gathering of 750 under a tent in Radcliffe Yard. At the luncheon in her honor, Marshall received the 2012 Radcliffe Medal, which the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study bestows on the Friday of Commencement Week. In 1962, Marshall said, she traveled to Wilmington, Del., as...