Thomas Healy

The Great Dissent

Thomas Healy received the 2014 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for The Great Dissent, a history of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s landmark dissent in Abrams v. United States, which gave rise to the robust First Amendment that Americans know today.

Thomas Healy is a professor of law at Seton Hall Law School. A graduate of Columbia Law School, he clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and was a Supreme Court correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. He has written extensively about free speech, the Constitution, and the federal courts. The Great Dissent is his first book.

2014 also featured a special recognition honor for Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, authors of the graphic novel March: Book One, which takes readers on a trip back in time to the sights and stories that defined the civil rights movement.