preface

Part I. Life
child’s play · graduation · curriculum vitae

Part II. Depression & War
longing · “a circle of flame” · guilt · letters from strangers · night sky · “made to man’s order” · magical imaginings · global war · summer’s end · “playing with fire” · fall · “falling out of time” · heavy · lost years

Part III. Markets & Families
first snow · an academic marketplace · calendars · family portraits · memory · “married, two children” · work

Part IV. Law
verdict · your backpack · finding their way to law · an unbridgeable gulf · to be “judged on our capabilities alone” · can I have a body when you cannot?

Part V. Power
the price of settlement · spring · “on our traditional basis of quality alone” · knowing · “public cowboy no. 1” · anniversaries · “the road to preferment”

Part VI. Precarity
time · “for the rest of his natural life” · mornings and ends · the vita of precarity · on being · growing old · a gentle rain

afterword, 2025

acknowledgments
note on methods and sources
notes
cowboy suit case files, published legal opinions, and oral histories
list of illustrations
index