Two weeks ago I read The Great Paper Caper, written for The New Yorker by Jill Lepore. Professor Lepore teaches history at Harvard, and is also a staff writer for the magazine.

The piece tells a great story about missing papers from the files of Justice Felix Frankfurter. Seemingly, through poor record-keeping and controls, someone walked the papers out the doors of the Library of Congress. (The article includes a “who’s who” of prominent men from the 1930s through the 1970s, and the story proves yet again that clerking at the U.S. Supreme Court advances careers.)

An over-arching theme of the story relates to document secrecy. The Presidential Papers Act of 1978 and the Federal Records Act of 1950