That is, until I read this recent Associated Press profile of  Wesley Brown, a 103-year-old U.S. District Court judge in Wichita, who was born in 1907 — just a year after Brennan.

First appointed by President Kennedy 49 years ago, Brown took senior status in 1979 but continues to hear cases thanks to a motorized wheelchair and an oxygen thank. The AP’s Roxana Hegeman notes Brown still leaves “legal colleagues awestruck by his stamina and devotion to work.”

Whether the presence of geriatric judges on the federal bench is desirable is debatable but there’s no denying it’s becoming more frequent. In a story earlier this year detailing the problems aging judges can cause, Slate noted that 12 percent of the nation’s 1,200 sitting federal trial and circuit court judges are 80 or older and eleven are over the age of 90, compared to four 20 years ago.

Most recently, a law student in Boston noted on Twitter, “why did Justice Brennan have to write so much… more to read lol #lawschool #civpro”

Now, a political science professor has now come forward with evidence that Brennan is in fact one of the most frequently cited justices in constitutional law casebooks.

Steven B. Lichtman, a Shippensburg University professor, analyzed the eighteen leading constitutional law case books and discovered that Brennan was the justice with the third most excerpted opinions. (He finished behind top ranked John Paul Stevens and the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who came in second.)

Rounding out the top ten were Antonin Scalia, Byron White, Sandra Day O’Connor, Harry Blackmun, Anthony Kennedy, and, in a three way tie for ninth place, William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall and Potter Stewart.

I wrote Lichtman asking for what he thought might explain Brennan’s high ranking and he suggested it was a combination of Brennan’s status as the most consistent and coherent liberal voice on the Court and his role as “a counterpart to the Rehnquist/Scalia conservative axis.”

Lichtman said the last factor was particularly important since he found “textbooks sought to present a point-counterpoint accounting of caselaw.”

“If you’re going to do that, Brennan is the most likely candidate to excerpt, since he was on the Court when the liberal foundation was established under Warren, and still on the Court when that foundation was undone under Rehnquist,” Lichtman explained in an e-mail.

Lichtman published his findings in the latest newsletter of the Law & Courts section of the American Political Science Association, which you can read here: Law & Courts newsletter.

There are plenty of legal lectures, awards and groups named after Justice Brennan but this was the first overtly political group that took him as their inspiration. So I contacted Tom Guild, one of the organizers, who helped found the group last September, to find out what prompted them to bestow this particular honor.

“Justice Brennan is our role model,” Guild, a former University of Central Oklahoma political science professor, explained in an email. “He was able to put together coalitions on the court to promote one man, one vote, women’s rights, the right to privacy, racial integration, social justice and led the court in taking many other important steps forward … We intend to try to build on the progress that he achieved for our country.  He is a progressive giant and a role model for our group.”

In “another tip of the hat” to Brennan, Guild said the governing board for the organization consists of “nine justices.”

Justice Brennan himself got turned off to electoral politics at an early age after watching his father being attacked for how he handled enforcement of Prohibition as the city commissioner in Newark, NJ, overseeing the city’s police and fire departments.

Steve is scheduled to speak about Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion at the University of Oklahoma’s law school in Norman on April 4 thanks to the efforts of another one of the Brennan Society’s organizers, Alex Wilson, who is a student there.

Wilson says he became “an avid” Brennan fan after taking constitutional law there during his first semester at the law school.

The band from Washington D.C. included the song “Dear Justice Letter” on its 1991 album “Steady Diet of Nothing.” The lyrics include:

Justice Brennan, I know it’s not your fault,
No baby no baby.
It’s just that you’re busted and dripping,
Your sorry lungs are all leaking,
It’s not over, it’s not over, I said.

I I didn’t know anything about this until Steve and I spoke last month at the Duke University School of Law last month where Professor Jed Purdy played the song for us in his office before moderating our discussion.

When he mentioned the song during our talk with students, Purdy elicited knowing nods of approval from the audience, many of whom were toddlers when the song came out.

It turns out Steve had emailed a member of the band, which has been on hiatus for some time, a few years ago asking why they’d done the song. In the reply, they explained they were fans of Brennan and were sorry to see him retire.

I might have come across reference to the song if I had only broadened out my research for the book to include a search of Dance of Days: Updated Edition: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital by Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins.

In a passage about the album, they note “the song mourned Brennan’s passing as ‘the last fair deal going down,’ a line from a blues standard and defiantly barked, ‘I won’t go die politely.’”

The authors note another song on the album was dedicated to Rodney King, whose beating at the hands of several Los Angeles police officers was caught on videotape.

It’s not clear whether Brennan ever heard the song. But he told Steve his musical tastes tended more towards Benny Goodman, the big band jazz and swing musician, so I’d imagine he might have found this honor a bit grating on the ears.

Earlier this month, the White House announced Virginia Seitz would be the president’s second nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which hasn’t had a leader confirmed by the Senate in seven years.

Verrilli had argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court as a litigator at the Jenner & Block law firm in Washington before joining the Obama administration as an associate deputy attorney general, according to the White House press release announcing his nomination. Verrilli currently serves as deputy White House counsel. Elena Kagan stepped down from the Solicitor General’s job to take a seat on the opposite side of the justices’ bench.

It will be interesting to see whether Republican senators make Brennan an issue during the confirmations of Verrilli and Seitz just as Thurgood Marshall became a focus of GOP questions last year during the confirmation hearing for Kagan, his former clerk.

Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., invoked Brennan during the confirmation of Gerard Lynch, one of his former clerks nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in 2009.

If confirmed, Verrilli and Seitz would join FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski as the Brennan clerks with the most senior appointments in the Obama Administration. But unlike under President Bush, who tapped Michael Chertoff to be his second Homeland Security secretary, no Brennan clerk has joined Obama’s cabinet as of yet.

Jon Bailey, the artist who made the sculpture, posted a correction on the blog last week and we exchanged emails in which he explained the citations weren’t random at all. After deciding that he wanted the bust to appear on a stack of books, Bailey asked the Brennan Center for Justice for suggestions about the justice’s most influential opinions.

“84 S. Ct. 210″ depicts the volume of the Supreme Court Reporter containing Brennan’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan while “82 S. Ct. 691″ is the volume with his decision in Baker v. Carr.

I had incorrectly looked for the volume of the U.S. Reports containing those citations and wound up finding cases from the 19th century. Bailey explained he intentionally referenced the Supreme Court Reporter “since I thought the non-lawyer would see ‘Supreme Court’ in the name and understand their purpose more readily.”

The other two books at the base of the sculpture reference cases from Brennan’s tenure on the New Jersey Supreme Court. Bailey says he had asked New Jersey’s then Chief Justice Deborah Poritz or the clerk of the court for advice about which cases to include.

Bailey was gracious about my error and said he liked my idea of visiting sites around New Jersey with meaning to Brennan.

“This warm, caring champion of the common man is quite worthy of such a pilgrimage,” Bailey wrote. “I hope you start a trend.”

Granted, there are only five sites in this category and everyone is losing by many multiples to SCOTUSblog. But we have consistently trailed behind the other two entries in the back of the pack: National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog and Josh Blackman’s Blog. (Mike Sacks’ First One @ One First blog seems to have a comfortable hold on second place.)

The ABA Journal described our blog as, “More than a companion to Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel’s new biography of the late justice, this is an ex­ploration of how the appointee of President Dwight D. Eisenhower remains relevant decades after he left the court.”

Pulling out a victory here against SCOTUSblog would probably require the kind of vote rigging Justice Brennan knew well from sitting as a New Jersey state judge in Jersey City, home of Frank Hague’s political machine. Hague was famous for his ability to rack up votes from people who had long since moved out of Jersey City – or died.

But I wouldn’t encourage any vote rigging on our behalf between now and when the ABA Journal’s polls close at the end of the month.

Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion is getting some additional attention in the January issue of the ABA Journal. It’s included as one of four “must reads” about the Supreme Court published in 2010.

Under New Jersey’s constitution, new state Supreme Court justices initially serve a seven-year term and then can be reappointed and attain “life” tenure. (Life tenure doesn’t quite mean what it does on the U.S. Supreme Court since New Jersey justices are subject to mandatory retirement at age 70.)

Until this year, every justice appointed under this system since the adoption of the state constitution in 1947 had been subsequently granted life tenure, as the Bergen Record explained in an editorial last week. But in May, New Jersey’s new Republican governor Chris Christie declined to reappoint Justice John Wallace, who at 68 was two years away from mandatory retirement anyway.

“The court over the course of the last three decades has gotten out of control,” Christie said in explaining his decision. “The only way to change the court is to change its members.”

Democratic leaders in the state senate responded by refusing to hold a hearing on Christie’s intended replacement for Wallace.

To avoid the possibility of any 3-3 ties, Chief Justice Stuart Rabner then named appellate judge Edwin Stern to serve on an interim basis as the court’s seventh justice.

The state constitution authorizes the chief justice to appoint a temporary justice “when necessary,” but legal scholars disagree what justifies such an appointment. In a law review article several years ago, Seton Hall’s Edward Hartnett had argued such an appointment is only justified when the Supreme Court would otherwise lack a quorum.

The latest wrinkle came earlier this month when Justice Roberto Rivera-Soto announced in an opinion that he plans to abstain from all decisions as long as Stern is participating.

That’s sparked an acrimonious debate about the propriety of a justice engaging  in this kind of sustained dissent.

Hartnett weighed in last week on the standoff his scholarship helped spark in a Newark Star Ledger op-ed.

“It is hardly unprecedented for judges to refuse to accede to precedents with which they strongly disagree,” Hartnett wrote, citing the death penalty dissents by Brennan and Thurgood Marshall. He also described how David Souter and John Paul Stevens adhered to their position that the Commerce Clause allows Congress to abrogate state sovereign immunity, a position repeatedly rejected by a majority of their colleagues.

Hartnett also cited Felix Frankurter’s refusal to vote on the merits of Federal Employers Liablity Act cases as evidence that “it is not even unprecedented for a judge to refuse to vote on the merits of a category of cases.”

“Justices Brennan, Marshall, Souter, Stevens and Frankfurter did not put themselves above the law or undermine the rule of law by these actions,” Harnett wrote. (He also notes that judges have “commonly reiterated adherence to views rejected by the majority” without feeling the need to abstain from all decisions, as Rivera-Soto has chosen to do.)

Rivera-Soto is up for reappointment himself next year and is already facing calls to resign prior to what could prove to be the second justice denied life tenure.

The state’s reappointment rule is something I thought about in the context of Brennan’s tenure on that court long before I read about Christie’s decision in May.

In 1954, Brennan gave a series of speeches obliquely criticizing Senator Joseph McCarthy, for his overly zealous investigations of alleged Communist infiltration of the federal government.

McCarthy took exception to that veiled critique when Brennan was subsequently nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court and sharply questioned Brennan at his confirmation hearing. McCarthy was the only voice vote against Brennan when his nomination subsequently reached the Senate floor.

While working on that section of the book, I wondered what might have happened had Brennan not been elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court and instead faced reappointment by New Jersey’s governor in 1959. Could his comments about McCarthyism have cost Brennan reappointment had the Red Scare heated up again?

Brennan later insisted he wasn’t at all concerned about how criticizing McCarthyism might have come back to haunt him. In light of Governor Christie’s decision, I wonder whether future New Jersey justices might not only look over their shoulder as they write opinions, but also shy away from weighing in on controversial subjects when the robes are off for fear of being denied tenure.

The big revelation in excerpts released so far is that she likes to read briefs on her Kindle while her colleague Antonin Scalia prefers the iPad.

Justice Brennan never took to computers during his tenure, but he wasn’t entirely detached from technological developments. He eagerly embraced the VCR he received for Christmas in 1981.

Brennan passed up the chance to get a stash of the latest movie releases a  few weeks later. In January 1982, he received a letter from an executive at RCA who was friends with some of Brennan’s former clerks.

“I was told that your favorite Christmas present was the RCA videodisc player,” the RCA executive wrote. “I was absolutely delighted and am sending you a few more discs to enjoy.”

Brennan thanked him in a note a few days later, but added that gift disclosure requirements “coupled with the fact that RCA has been in the past, and may again be, a litigant here, counsels that I repay your generosity with the return of the discs.”

Instead, Brennan visited a local video rental shop where he picked up his own movies. Brennan’s clerks laughed when he told them he had rented an off-color comedy by the Cheech & Chong duo.

Still, Brennan later recalled being far more excited to meet Benny Goodman, the famous jazz clarinetist and bandleader, than Steven Spielberg, who had directed the enormously popular E.T. and Indiana Jones, when the three received honorary degrees from Brandeis University in May 1986.

John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat whose four-year tenure as chairman will soon come to an end, began his opening statement by quoting from Brennan’s opinion in the 1989 Texas v. Johnson flag burning case.

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” Brennan wrote.

In the written version of his opening statement prepared for delivery, Conyers added “That was Justice William Brennan, a man who understood the founding principles of our nation.” (I only heard him say, “That was Justice William Brennan” at the hearing.)

The seven witnesses appearing at the hearing included Geoffrey Stone, the University of Chicago law professor who clerked for Brennan. But Stone didn’t include any references to his former boss in his written or verbal testimony.