Nine. The number of U.S. Supreme Court justices when the court is at full strength is also the number of books James F. Simon, 79, dean emeritus at New York Law School, has written. But that could change. “I’m reluctant to whisper this in my wife’s ear, but I’ve got at least one more idea for a book. And we’ll see what happens,” Simon says, chuckling.

Simon grew up in Fort Worth, Texas in a family of lawyers, but set out on a slightly different path. While a student at Yale Law School, he interned for the Washington bureau of Newsweek, where Ben Bradlee was then the bureau chief. “One of the reasons I was so interested in writing about the law is that I thought ‘Almost everyone in my family practiced law. I think I need to do something different.’ I liked writing about the law, I still do.”