The Transition was born when I read the quote from Thurgood Marshall’s final dissent in 1991, a rebuke of his colleagues for going back on a decision made only a few years earlier (“Neither the law nor the facts…underwent any change in the last four years. Only the personnel of this Court did.”). It is unusual for Supreme Court justices to pull back the curtain to reveal the extent to which the identity of the nine members of the Court, and not some neutrally-applied interpretation of the law, dictate outcomes. Yet here was Justice Marshall asserting that changes in personnel were taking the Court in new directions. And then, the very next day, came news of his retirement, an event that would set in motion one of the most memorable and public Supreme Court confirmation battles in American history and that would further steer the Court away from the Justice Marshall’s own philosophy. In his dissent, Justice Marshall was highlighting just how much Supreme Court transitions matter. The Transition is about just how much they can. But actually the first time I read that dissent, I was not concerned with big picture claims about the Court and its personnel. I was concerned for my client. It was 2005 and I had been assigned a case that my Memphis law firm had been connected to for many years - the case of Pervis Payne. When Mr. Payne’s death penalty case reached the Supreme Court in 1991, the lawyers who represented him worked at my firm. They had no way of knowing that the case would elicit the final written words in Justice Thurgood Marshall’s illustrious legal career. Nor could they know that over a decade later, advocacy on Mr. Payne’s behalf would continue. I was given the task of arguing for DNA testing of evidence from the case, connecting me in a small way to Justice Marshall’s last dissent. Though I was unsuccessful and would leave legal practice for law teaching a few years later, Mr. Payne’s lawyers continued to fight and he was removed from death row in 2021. While The Transition is not about Pervis Payne, it takes its inspiration from Justice Marshall’s dissenting comment about changing personnel, language that has re-emerged recently in contemporary dissents as the Court, led by Marshall’s successor, overrules prior decisions. How ironic that the change in personnel set in motion by Marshall’s retirement brought the most significant shift on the Court as Justice Clarence Thomas has brought his constitutional vision to replace that of Justice Marshall. That contrast was something my students and I had grappled with over the years in my courses on race, education, and the Constitution, and it was the discussions there that provided the earliest brainstorms for what would become The Transition. Thus, The Transition brings together several distinct threads of my legal career - the study of distinct answers to foundational constitutional questions, particularly those connected to race and schooling; a belief that the identities of the justices (who is on the Court) has more impact on what the Court does than is often acknowledged; and an inception in a case I encountered and played a small role in as a lawyer. The Transition looks back at two lawyers who have shaped the work of the Court for nearly a century, helps explain how the Court of today came to operate as it does, and provides a foundation for considering the impacts of the transitions of the future.