Malvina Shanklin Harlan

Malvina French Shanklin Harlan (1839 – October 10, 1916), informally known as "Mallie", was the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, the grandmother of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II, and the author of a 1915 memoir entitled Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854–1911. Her memoir remained unpublished until 2001, when it was published at the instigation of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Early life and marriage Malvina French "Mallie" Shanklin was born in 1839 in Indiana, raised in Evansville, and educated at girls' seminaries until she was 16.

Her family held strongly anti-slavery views,

Despite being a supporter of slavery at the time, John Marshall Harlan remained a supporter of the Union. When the Civil War approached a few years after their marriage, he joined the Union Army in 1861. Although Harlan rose to prominence after the war as an opponent of the Emancipation Proclamation and supporter of slavery, in his later life he would eventually become a staunch supporter of civil rights. He became known as "The Great Dissenter" due to his many dissents in Supreme Court cases that restricted civil liberties.

Memoir Shanklin Harlan's memoir, completed in 1915 (the year before her death), remained unpublished until 2001, when it was published in the Journal of Supreme Court History at the instigation of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ginsburg had encountered the 200-page typed manuscript of the memoir among the John Marshall Harlan papers collected by the Library of Congress while doing research for a lecture on the wives of Supreme Court justices for the Supreme Court Historical Society. Ginsburg and the Historical Society first approached various commercial, academic, and university press publishers without finding any that were interested in publishing the manuscript, before finally deciding to publish it in its entirety in a special issue of the Historical Society's journal, a publication with only 6,000 subscribers.

Upon its publication by the journal, the memoir was reviewed in an article in The New York Times by Linda Greenhouse, a reporter who covered Supreme Court issues for the newspaper.

The range of dates that Shanklin Harlan used in the title of her memoir (1854–1911) was the period of her time with John Marshall Harlan from when she met him when she was 16 until his death in 1911.

Death Harlan died on October 10, 1916, at the home of her daughter in Washington, D.C. She was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.