I am saddened to report that my good friend James L. Swanson died of a rare form of brain cancer yesterday in his hometown of Chicago. He was 66. In 2001, James came on board Cato to create and serve as the first editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review, which we released on September 17, 2002, at Cato’s inaugural Constitution Day Symposium, which he organized. From the start, when Constitution Day was barely known, both the annual review and the symposium have been highly regarded in Washington’s legal community. Credit goes to James for securing everything from the cases to be covered to the authors to do so, the editing, the initial publication arrangements—even the federal colors of the review’s cover—and the distinguished speakers for the symposium.
After two rounds of the review and symposium, we lost James to the larger publishing world as he was under intense pressure to complete the manuscript that would become a New York Times best-seller: “Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.” More recently, an Apple TV + series, on which James worked closely, was based on the book.
With an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Chicago and a law degree from UCLA, James went on to become a Lincoln scholar of the first order and a collector of Lincoln memorabilia. Indeed, he was born on February 12, 1959, exactly 150 years after Lincoln’s birth. And his death has come exactly 160 years after the day that the train carrying Lincoln’s body left Washington for Illinois.
A simple search will show the many well-reviewed books James has written over the years and the extraordinary range of his interests—quite apart from his work in the 1990s as the editor of the First Amendment Law Handbook. And all of that was accomplished while he served two terms as a senior official in the Justice Department and served also as a clerk for Judge Douglas Ginsburg during the judge’s first year on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
For those of us at Cato old enough, however, it is not only James’ prodigious knowledge or his dedication to the work before him that we will remember, but his little chuckle after uttering a bon mot and the warm smile that followed that we will most cherish. Rest in peace, good friend.