Vol.15 No.12 (December 2005), pp.1041-1043

 

THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT: THE PURSUIT OF JUSTICE, by Christopher Tomlins (ed). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co. 2005. 560pp. Cloth $40.00. ISBN: 0-618-32969-2.

 

Reviewed by Nancy Maveety, Department of Political Science, Tulane University.

 

The book jacket of this massive collaborative project identifies it as “the authoritative reference,” and it surely does provide a comprehensive and very readable treatment of the historical eras and decision-making developments of the U.S. Supreme Court. Because the multi-author volume represents a cooperative effort between the publisher and the American Bar Foundation, it emphasizes the “life of the law” aspect of the Supreme Court and focuses on its changes as an institution since its beginnings in 1790 under the new Constitution. But political scientists will find that politics is not neglected, and the political regime in which the court is situated is the realm in which the chapters set their individual studies.

 

The book is divided into four substantive sections, plus one set of appendixes. The first three sections subdivide the history of the Supreme Court into three seventy-year segments; each chapter, by and large, focuses on a single chief justiceship. There are exceptions: Wythe Holt’s opening chapter and very useful review of the establishment of the federal court system, Maeva Marcus’ foundational chapter on the institution’s early years, and William Wiecek’s quite fine analysis of the Stone and Vinson Courts as a single period of transition and transformation.

 

The individual, chief justice-era chapters generally follow the same content guidelines: key personnel are identified (sometimes praised, sometimes skewered), the partisan political setting is mapped, salient institutional developments relevant to the judiciary are discussed, and important rulings in constitutional law are summarized. Coherence among the chapters is provided by their historical sequencing, and chapters written by different authors nevertheless lead into one another very smoothly, creating the sensation of a unitary narrative. William Forbath’s chapter on the White Court is particularly successful in providing a transition from the preceding chapter, and also does a good job of establishing the political movement and policy issue parameters that would guide the White Court as well as its successors in the first half of the twentieth century.

 

The fourth section offers several refreshing twists on examining the Supreme Court across two centuries, including Norman Rosenberg’s analysis of the Court’s image and projection in popular culture and David Frederick’s history of Supreme Court advocacy. The appendixes are useful references in their own right, consisting of tables of Supreme Court personnel, broken out according to the tenure of the chief justice, a biographical listing of each justice to serve on the Court, and real dollar figures on the Court’s budget, from salaries to building costs, from 1789 to the present. (I might have opted [*1042] for a table on case loads over time, tracking the rise (and fall) in appeals, petitions and docketed cases, instead of the budgetary table, particularly as the former issue is a topic discussed by many of the chapters.) The only real drawback of the otherwise fine supplementary material is that the reader must cross-reference between the tables of Supreme Court personnel and the biographical entries to identify a justice’s appointing president.

 

There is a wealth of information here, and the total number of chapters (18) make a detailed review of each impossible in the venue of a short review. Dangerous though this might be, let me offer a highly selective rendering of which chapters might be most interesting to certain readers with certain purposes.

 

First, although the book is not likely to be utilized as a standard course text, because of its length, there are certain chapters that would be valuable as supplementary readings for students enrolled in constitutional law and Supreme Court judicial process courses. Lucas (Scot) Powe’s closing chapter “The Supreme Court and the Election Returns,” presents a very accessible overview of the political science debate about the degree to which the Court is counter-majoritarian. Mark Tushnet’s chapter on the Warren Court, which reprises much of his well-known scholarship on that court era, provides a pithy and helpful summary of that famous court period for the uninitiated. Good also on the historical background and jurisprudential legacy of a court era is Keith Whittington’s chapter on the Burger Court. Whittington manages to be fairly comprehensive in his coverage of important rulings while also mentioning the Burger Court’s importance in terms of behavioral, decision-making trends and its continuity with the role orientation of its predecessor.

 

Some chapters will appeal to court specialists because they bring neglected eras to life, encapsulating those periods through convincing and thoughtful categorizations. One example is Howard Gillman’s treatment of the Waite Court—possibly not a court era on most top-ten lists for memorability. But Gillman’s sympathetic construction of Waite as a person and a judge, and his useful encapsulation of the Waite Court’s decisions as “transitional yet trend-setting,” animate a court period that, for many instructors of constitutional law, is the black hole of the Civil Rights Cases and little more. As will be familiar to court scholars, Gillman’s chapter, like Tushnet’s, draws on his more extensive scholarship of the Gilded Age. Other chapters which highlight important institutional developments occurring during less-than-frequently-celebrated eras are Melvin Urofsky’s chapter on the Taft Court, which stresses Chief Justice Taft’s institution-altering administrative reforms, and Michael Vorenberg’s chapter on the Chase Court, which emphasizes Chief Justice Chase’s success (despite the distraction of presidential ambitions) in restoring respectability to the Court lost under Taney and DRED SCOTT.

 

Finally, certain chapters are just fun, because they engage the reader with an interest in the Supreme Court in the institution’s cultural impact and meaning as a cultural entity. Katherine Fischer [*1043] Taylor’s chapter on the material setting and appearances of the early court is a fascinating tour through what she calls the “topography of power” that describes and situates courts. Whether comparing the role of layout between American courts and legislatures (the orientation of the usually rectangular room), or discussing the operational impact of the first Supreme Courts’ sharing quarters with lower and trial courts, Taylor’s discussion asks important questions about the relationship between power and place.

 

Suffice it to say, while most specialist readers will find much that is familiar and even pedestrian in Tomlins’ volume, they will also find that it is generally presented in dynamic ways. Narratives of court periods are enlivened with gossipy tidbits and tales of personal peccadilloes (Justice Frankfurter alone counting for many of them.) Courts and their decisions are transplanted back into the context of their time, in terms of electoral politics, rhetorical conventions, and socio-cultural norms, allowing generalist and student readers of the book to understand famous Supreme Court rulings in the historical moment and political situation in which they occurred, yet most chapters also engage in the kind of comparative assessment of court periods and decision making that court scholars value. A substantial and well-chosen selection of illustrations adds a visual dimension to many chapters and topics. Still, none of these gestures toward making THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT appealing to a popular, but historically literate, audience diminish the volume’s value as a resource for scholars of American politics and law and students of the Supreme Court. Though few readers will likely read the book cover to cover, as did this reviewer, it is worth the commitment, because one will enjoy immersing oneself in the many and storied dimensions of an endlessly fascinating subject.

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Nancy Maveety.