Welcome to the online home of author, Peter S. Canellos.
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Peter S. Canellos is the author of The Great Dissenter: The story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero, the profound tale of how a former slave owner – with the help of a once-enslaved man who grew up alongside him and was believed to be his half-brother – changed American law. A current editor at POLITICO, former editorial page editor of The Boston Globe, and editor of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, Peter has harbored an interest in Harlan since his days at Columbia Law School three decades ago.
The Great Dissenter captures a huge swath of history, from aristocratic pre-Civil War Kentucky, to Cincinnati at the height of the Underground Railroad, to the famed horse-racing grounds of Europe, to the velvet chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. It gives readers a front-row seat for some of the greatest legal battles of all time – as Americans fight for civil rights and economic justice in the Gilded Age. And it shows how one man’s willingness to stand up to his colleagues reverberated for a century until his dissenting views – not those of the court’s majority – became the law of the land.
More information on the upcoming publication can be found here.
Justice John Marshall Harlan 1833 - 1911
Harlan was more than just a legal theorist. He was a man who suffered through war and peace, victory and defeat, shame and redemption. He acted on what he saw before him. He understood the power of ideas, but also the power of individuals. He learned firsthand, from his family, that those born into slavery could drink just as deeply of freedom as white men could. If the origins of today’s system of justice are visible in Harlan’s dissents, so too are they visible in his life.
– From the Introduction of The Great Dissenter
"Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens"
John Marshall Harlan
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