Stephen Wermiel

Wermiel began as a college intern and later became a correspondent for the Boston Globe for the Washington, D.C. area.[3][5] From 1979 to 1991, Wermiel covered the U.S. Supreme Court for the Wall Street Journal, remaining there even after his law school graduation.[3][6][7] In the 1990s, Wermiel also served on the board of directors and legal committee of the ACLU of Georgia.[5]

In 1986, Justice Brennan secretly agreed to work with Wermiel on a biography after Judge Abner Mikva recommended Wermiel.[1][8] Justice Brennan gave Wermiel more than sixty hours of recorded interviews in chambers and allowed him access to tens of thousands of pages of records.[1][8][9] The records included case files, correspondence, and case histories that Justice Brennan's clerks had prepared each term.[8] Wermiel was the only person allowed to see the case histories.[10] Wermiel began working on the book, which he intended to publish after Justice Brennan's retirement.[1] Justice Brennan retired in 1990, but after his death in 1997, Wermiel stopped working.[8] At the time, he was approximately twenty-five percent done with the book.[10] In 2004, Jeffrey Toobin and Justice Brennan's son, William J. Brennan III, criticized Wermiel for his failure to use his unparalleled access to Justice Brennan's documents that was unavailable to other researchers.[1][8][10] Wermiel responded by saying that he was overwhelmed by the project.[1] In 2006, Wermiel asked Seth Stern to work on the book with him.[1][8][11] Stern who reorganized the material and drafted most of the book chapters.[8] In 2010, Stern and Wermiel published the book as Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion.[8][12]

Wermiel is a contributor to SCOTUSblog, where he writes the SCOTUS for Law Students column.[13] Wermiel has made numerous appearances on cable news networks, including ABC News and MSNBC.[14][15] Wermiel has also made appearances on C-SPAN as a correspondent and legal expert.[16]

Wermiel was a teaching fellow at William and Mary Law School and then taught at Georgia State University College of Law.[3] Eventually, Wermiel accepted a professorship at American University Washington College of Law, his alma mater.[3]

Wermiel and Representative Jamie Raskin, who was also a professor at the Washington College of Law at the time, co-founded the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project in 1999.[17][18][19] The project places law students in underserved high schools, where the law students teach constitutional law and civic engagement to high school students.[17] Wermiel previously served as the Associate Director of the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project.[20] He currently serves as a faculty adviser for the project.

Wermiel is a Fellow in the Program on Law & Government at the university.[3]

Wermiel is a faculty adviser for the Moot Court Honor Society, American University Law Review, Administrative Law Review, and the Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law.

• Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion (with Seth Stern) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010).
• Justice Brennan and Federalism Encyclopedia of American Federalism (Joseph Marbach, Ellis Katz, & Troy Smith, eds., Greenwood Press 2005).
• Essay on Justice Brennan Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (Yale U. Press 2004).
• William J. Brennan, Jr. Oxford Companion to American Law (Oxford U. Press 2002).
• William J. Brennan, Jr. American National Biography Online (Oxford U. Press 2001) (reprinted in American National Biography (Print Supp.), 2002).
• A Claim of Sexual Harassment A Year in the Life of the Supreme Court (Rodney A. Smolla, ed., Duke U. Press 1995).
• William J. Brennan Jr. The Supreme Court Justices A Biographical Dictionary (Melvin Urofsky, ed., Garland Publishing 1994).
• William J. Brennan Jr. The Supreme Court Justices Illustrated Biographies 1789-1993 (Clare Cushman, ed., Congressional Q. 1993).