The Theatrical Lives of Justices explores the Supreme Court of the United States as a site of performance and examines Supreme Court justices as deliberate, practiced performers. The book focuses on three interrelated questions: How does the Court’s work encourage theatrical performances from its contemporary justices? How have experiences in the performing arts served the justices? How have justices been portrayed onstage and onscreen? From The Magnificent Yankee to Saturday Night Live, embodied performances have offered the public images of an institution that has historically sought invisibility. Justices in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, however, have boldly sought the limelight themselves. They operate increasingly as celebrities, their own performances commingling with other representations of the Court. To function effectively under such spotlights, justices must draw on and continue to develop a performance literacy. The justices’ theatrical lives—their own ventures onto screens and stages, including the Court itself—highlight the growing role that performance plays at the apex of the US judiciary.

Gad Guterman is professor of theatre in the Sargent Conservatory of Theatre Arts at Webster University, USA. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between law and performance. He is the author of Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The book was featured in the 2015 “Brilliance of the American Theatre” event sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Drama Book Shop as well as in the “Spotlight of New Works” roundtable at the 2015 Association of Theatre in Higher Education conference. Guterman’s essays have appeared in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Contemporary Theatre Review, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and in the edited collections American Multicultural Identity, Theatre and Cartographies of Power: Repositioning the Latina/o Americas, and Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre. He recently served as Theatre Journal’s performance review editor.