Branch Rickey

For those of us interested in law, religion, and sports, Books & Culture has an interesting review of a new biography of Branch Rickey by Jimmy Breslin. Rickey, of course, was the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers who desegregated Major League Baseball in 1945 by signing Jackie Robinson, an act of courage that played a considerable role in launching the Civil Rights Era. Rickey was also, as it happens, a devout Christian (from a long line of pious Ohio Methodists) and a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School (my former teacher Evan Caminker--now the dean of Michigan Law--is the inaugural holder of a chair at Michigan endowed in Branch Rickey's honor).