Cass Sunstein has a piece entitled Where are the liberal visionaries on the Supreme Court? at the New Republic. Here is a taste:
A justice can be a visionary without being excellent and even without being especially good. To be sure, Holmes and Brandeis were brilliant justices. But Douglas was erratic and often sloppy. Black relied on a form of unhelpful literalism, arguing, altogether implausibly, that the text of the Constitution provided unambiguous guidance in the hardest cases. Warren, Brennan, and Marshall had wonderful moments, but in terms of judicial craft, none of them can be ranked with (for example) Robert Jackson or Felix Frankfurter.
