During a recent appearance at the University of Alabama School of Law, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan spoke reverently about clerking for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall 25 years ago.

Her memories of the stories Marshall told his clerks during her time there had been stirred up, she said, by “a very fine book” she read over the summer: Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove, a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning account of a Florida murder case Marshall handled more than 60 years ago.