by Peter Irons
The cases dealing with racial segregation after World War II have generated many fine books. Clement Vose started filling this shelf with Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases (1959). Richard Kluger produced a masterful study of the school segregation cases, both detailed and exciting, in Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education (1976). Jack Greenberg, who succeeded Thurgood Marshall as the NAACP’s legal director, offered an excellent insider’s account of dozens of civil rights cases in Crusaders in the Courts (1994). Mark Tushnet, a prolific writer on constitutional history, adds background to these cases in The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (1987).
Other good case studies include Michal Belknap’s book on the Communist Party cases, Cold War Political Justice (1977), and two books by Anthony Lewis: Gideon’s Trumpet (1964), on the right to counsel, and his study of an important libel case in Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (1991). Robert S. Alley explored the school prayer cases in Without a Prayer: Religious Expression in Public Schools (1996). Joel Dreyfuss and Charles Lawrence III dealt with affirmative action in The Bakke Case: The Politics of Inequality (1979).
There are several excellent books on the abortion controversy and cases. The most detailed and important is David J. Garrow’s Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (1994). Barbara H. Craig and David M. O’Brien present much useful data in Abortion and American Politics (1993). Sarah Weddington, who argued the Roe case before the Supreme Court, offers her account in A Question of Choice (1992); and Norma McCorvey, the real “Jane Roe,” told her story in I Am Roe (1994), written before her “born-again” conversion to the pro-life position.
In addition to individual case studies, there are two books that recount the stories of several important cases. John Garraty edited a book with accounts of Supreme Court cases over two centuries in Quarrels That Have Shaped the Constitution (1964; expanded edition in 1987). I recorded the first-person stories of Supreme Court litigants between 1940 and 1986 in The Courage of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court (1988).
Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper continue to edit another important source on significant Supreme Court cases, Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law. This series includes all the briefs and oral arguments (since 1955) in more than two hundred cases. I have produced (with Stephanie Guitton) three compilations of edited and narrated oral arguments in a series entitled May It Please the Court. The first set (in 1993) included arguments in twenty-three cases, including Bakke, Miranda, Roe, and the Pentagon Papers and Watergate tapes cases. The second set, Arguments on Abortion (1997), included arguments in eight cases dealing with contraception and abortion, from Griswold in 1965 to Casey in 1992. The third set, The First Amendment (1998), included arguments in cases that dealt with libel, obscenity, nude dancing, picketing, and other issues of free expression.
Judicial biography offers another perspective on the Constitution and Supreme Court. I have relied heavily on two sources in this book. Melvin I. Urofsky edited a collection of short (2- to 10-page) biographies of all Supreme Court justices from John Jay to Ruth Ginsburg in The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary (1994). I contributed a sketch of Justice Frank Murphy to this book. Appended to each essay are references for further reading. Henry J. Abraham recounts the details of each Supreme Court nomination in Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court (1974; 2d ed., 1985). Abraham writes in a chatty style and offers his judgment on most justices. Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel have edited a five-volume set of longer biographies in The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 1789-1978 (1969-1980).
The following list includes biographies of the Court’s most important justices; Urofsky’s collection offers material on those I have slighted here. There are more than twenty books about Chief Justice John Marshall. Albert J. Beveridge produced a monumental four-volume biography, The Life of John Marshall (1916-1919). Leonard Baker offered a shorter, more recent account in John Marshall: A Life in Law (1974). R. Kent Newmyer wrote of Marshall’s devoted colleague in Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (1985). Carl B. Swisher provided a largely admiring biography of Marshall’s successor in Roger B. Taney (1935); Lewis Walker offered another, but still admiring view in Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1965). No biographer has yet revealed the hard core of Taney’s racism.
Frederick J. Blue chronicled the career of Taney’s successor in Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (1987). Carl B. Swisher produced another admiring biography in Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law (1930), and Charles Fairman had few criticisms of his subject in Mr. Justice Miller and the Supreme Court (1939). C. Peter Magrath did a fine job in Morrison Waite: The Triumph of Character (1963), but Willard L. King offered little analysis in Melville Weston Fuller: Chief Justice of the United States, 1888-1910 (1950). Robert B. Highsaw took account of political factors in Edward Douglass White: Defender of the Conservative Faith (1981). Loren Beth wrote a good biography in John Marshall Harlan: The Last Whig Justice (1992). Oliver Wendell Holmes has attracted several biographers; the most recent and most perceptive is Sheldon Novick in Honorable Justice (1989).
There are two good biographies of Justice Brandeis. Alpheus T. Mason wrote an early study in Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life (1946); and Philippa Strum followed with Brandeis: Justice for the People (1984). A. L. Todd provided an account of Brandeis’s confirmation battle in Justice on Trial: The Case of Louis D. Brandeis (1964). Alpheus T. Mason offered a large biography of his large subject in William Howard Taft: Chief Justice (1964). Mason had earlier written an excellent portrait in Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (1956), which made good use of Stone’s papers. Richard Polenberg wrote an incisive biography of a reclusive justice in The World of Benjamin Cardozo (1997).
The justices named by Franklin Roosevelt have attracted numerous biographers. Gerald T. Dunne was largely uncritical in Hugo Black and the Judicial Revolution (1977). Felix Frankfurter has eluded a full-scale biography. Harry N. Hirsch portrayed him as an insecure judicial bully in The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter (1981), and Melvin I. Urofsky matched praise and criticism in Felix Frankfurter: Judicial Restraint and Individual Liberties (1992). James Simon tried without much success to explain his subject’s personal and judicial wanderings in Independent Journey: The Life of William O. Douglas (1980). Bruce Allen Murphy is completing another biography of Douglas. Sidney Fine did an outstanding job in Frank Murphy: The Washington Years (1984).
G. Edward White stuck closely to the public record in Earl Warren: A Public Life (1982); in fairness, Warren’s private life was fairly boring. Tinsley E. Yarbrough did an excellent job in John Marshall Harlan: Great Dissenter of the Warren Court (1992), although the second Justice Harlan hardly matched his grandfather (or Justice Holmes) as a dissenter. The only available biography of Justice William Brennan, Kim Isaac Eisler’s A Justice for All: William J. Brennan, Jr., and the Decisions That Transformed America (1992), is thin and bland. Stephen Wermeil, who covered the Supreme Court for The Wall Street Journal, is completing an authorized biography that draws on Brennan’s papers and many interviews. Abe Fortas has attracted two competent biographers. Bruce Allen Murphy focused on scandal in Fortas: The Rise and Fall of a Supreme Court Justice (1988); Laura Kalman looked more closely at her subject’s legal and judicial career in Fortas: A Biography (1990). Thurgood Marshall, whose papers became available on his death in 1993, has not yet attracted a competent biographer. Marshall’s close friend, Carl T. Rowan, offered no broad perspective in Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (1993).
Chief Justice Warren Burger, who detested reporters and distrusted scholars, has not yet attracted a full-s
cale biographer. Philippa Strum is working on a biography of Justice Harry Blackmun, and John C. Jeffries, Jr., a former law clerk, has produced a solid biography of his boss in Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (1994). Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist still occupies the Court’s center seat, and his judicial career has not yet concluded. I offered a comparison of two very different justices in Brennan vs. Rehnquist: The Battle for the Constitution (1994), based largely on their published opinions.
Let me emphasize once more that this is a highly selective compilation of books about the Constitution and the Supreme Court. The fact that libraries contain hundreds more worth reading attests to the importance of this document and this institution to our society.
INDEX
The following index terms appeared in the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.
Aaron, John
Abington Township v. Schempp
abortion; partial-birth
Abrams, Jacob
Abrams v. United States
Acheson, Dean
Adair v. United States
Adams, Pres. John
Adams, Pres. John Quincy
Adams, Lionel
Adams, Sam
Adkins v. Children’s Hospital
affirmative action
African Americans: citizenshipfree blacks; rightssocial equality of; voting
Agricultural Adjustment Act
agriculture
Alien Act (1798)
Alien Land Law
Alien Registration Act (1940)
Alito, Justice Samuel
Allgeyer v. Louisiana
al Qaeda
Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union
Amendment 2, Colorado’s
American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ)
American Citizens’ Equal Rights Association
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
American Colonization Society
American Independent Party
American Insurance Co. v. Canter
American Medical Association
American Newspaper Guild
American Party
American Protective League
American Railroad Union
American Sugar Refining Company
Amistad case
anarchists
Antelope case, The
Antifederalists
apportionment of districts
arms, right to bear
Arthur, Pres. Chester A.
Article III
Article VI
Articles of Confederation
Ashcroft, John
Ashurst, Sen. Henry
assembly, freedom of
Associated Press
association, right of
Authorization for Use of Military Force
Baer, Elizabeth
Baker v. Carr
Bakke, Allan
Baldwin, Abraham
Baldwin, Justice Henry
Baldwin, Roger
Baltimore, Lord
Baltimore, Md.
Bank of the United States
bankruptcy
Banning, Sandra
Barbour, Justice Philip
Barnett, Gov. Ross
Barnette, Walter
Barron, John
Barron v. Baltimore
Bassett, William
Bastian, Judge Walter
Bates, Daisy
Beard, Charles
Bendetsen, Col. Karl
Benjamin, Sen. Judah
Besig, Ernest
Biddle, Francis
Bilbo, Sen. Theodore
Bill of Rightsapplied to the statesdemand for ratificationtest cases
Bingham, Rep. John A.
Black, Justice Hugo
Black, Judge Lloyd
Blackmun, Justice Harry
Blackstone, Sir William
Blair, John, Jr.
Blair, Montgomery
Blaisdell, John H.
Blatchford, Justice Samuel
Blount, William
Board of Education of Westside Schools v. Mergens
Bolling v. Sharpe
Bolsheviks
Booth, John Wilkes
Borah, Sen. William
Bork, Robert
Borquin, Judge George
Boston, Mass.
Boudinot, Rep. Elias
Boulware, Harold
Bowers, Michael
Bowers v. Hardwick
boycotts
Bradford, Gov. William
Bradley, Justice Joseph
Brandeis, Justice Louis
Brandenburg v. Ohio
Brant, Irving
Breckinridge, John
Brennan, Justice William
Brewer, Justice David
Breyer, Justice Stephen
Briggs, Harry, Sr.
Briggs v. Elliott
Brown, Justice Henry B.
Brown, John
Brown, Linda
Brown, Oliver
Brown v. Board of Education
Bryan, Justice Albert
Bryan, William Jennings
Buchanan, Patrick
Buchanan, Pres. James
Buck, Carrie
Buck v. Bell
Budenz, Louis
Burdell, Charles
Burger, Chief Justice Warren
Burke, Aedanus
Burns, Anthony
Burr, Aaron
Burton, Justice Harold
Bush, Pres. George H. W.
Bush, Pres. George W.
Bush v. Gore
Butler, Justice Pierce
Butler, Richard
Buxton, Dr. Thomas
Byrd, Sen. Harry
Byrnes, Justice James
Calhoun, Sen. John
Calvin, John
Campbell, Justice John
Campbell, Marcus
Cantwell v. Connecticut
capital punishment
Cardozo, Justice Benjamin
Carhart, Dr. Leroy
Carnegie, Andrew
Carswell, Judge G. Harrold
Carter, Robert
Carter v. Carter Coal Co.
Casey, Gov. Robert
Catholics
Catron, Justice John
Center for Reproductive Rights
Chafee, Zechariah
Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge
Chase, Chief Justice Salmon Portland
Chase, Justice Samuel
Cheever, George
Chein, Isador
Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway Co. v. Minnesota
Children’s Hospital, Washington, D.C.
Chinese Americans
Chinese Exclusion Act
Chisholm v. Georgia
Choate, Joseph
Cinque
circuit-riding
citizenship: of African Americansof immigrantsnationalstate
City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co.
civil rights
Civil Rights Act (1866)
Civil Rights Act (1875)
Civil Rights Act (1964)
Civil Rights Cases (1883)
civil service reform
Civil War
Clark, Kenneth
Clark, Justice Tom
Clark, Judge William S.
Clarke, Justice John H.
Clay, Sen. Henry
Clayton, Judge Henry D., Jr.
clear
and present danger test
Cleveland, Pres. Grover
Clifford, Justice Nathan
Clinton, Pres. Bill
Clinton, Gov. George
Coffee, Linda
Cohen, Philip and Mendes
Cohens v. Virginia
Coke, Edward
Cold War
Colegrove case
Colfax Massacre
color-blind principle
Colvin, Reynold
commerce, regulation of
Commerce Clause
Communist International
Communist Labor Party
Communist Party
Compromise of 1850
Comstock, Anthony
confessions
Congress: Firstpowers of
Connor, Sheriff “Bull”
Constitution, U.S.: adaptability ofbicentennial character of the Framers modeled on foreign examples Philadelphia convention (1787) ratification ofsupremacy of
contraception
Contract Clause
contractsliberty of
Controlled Substance Act
Cooley, Thomas M.
Coolidge, Pres. Calvin
Cooper v. Aaron
Copperheads
corporate charters
corporations
Corrigan v. Buckley
coverture
Cox, Archibald
Crowninshield, Richard
Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause
Cruikshank, Williamcase of
Cruzan v. Missouri Department of Health
Cummings, Homer
Cumming v. Board of Education
Curtis, Justice Benjamin
Curtis, George
Cushing, Justice William
Dallas, Alexander
D & X abortions
Daniel, Justice Peter
Dartmouth College case
Davis, Justice David
Davis, Jefferson
Davis, John W.
Davis v. Prince Edward County
Day, Justice William R.
Dayton, Jonathan
Death With Dignity Act, Oregon’s
Debs, Eugene
debtors
Declaration of Independence
DeFunis, Marcocase of
De Jonge, Dirk
De Jonge v. Oregon
