Currie's masterful synthesis of legal analysis and narrative history, gives us a sophisticated and much-needed evaluation of the Supreme Court's first hundred years. "A thorough, systematic, and careful assessment. . . . As a reference work for constitutional teachers, it is a gold mine."—Charles A. Lofgren, Constitutional Commentary

Explains how United States presidents select justices for the Supreme Court, evaluates the performance of each justice, and examines the influence of politics on their selection.

The Beginning and Its Justice.

First published in 1994. In the two centuries of governance under the Constitution, 105 men and two women have sat as justices on the nation’s highest tribunal, the Supreme Court of the United States. Each of them has brought some unique insights or talents to that position. Contributors to this volume were asked to concentrate on the judicial tenure of their subjects, and to interpret those careers and evaluate their importance. They were asked to deal with the pre-Court years only insofar as those experiences had a major impact on jurisprudence.

With its ability to review and interpret all American law, the U. S. Supreme Court is arguably the most influential branch of government but also the one most carefully shielded from the public gaze.

From the author of Hostage to Fortune; The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy ("Superb" —Michael Beschloss; "Remarkable" —Arthur Schlesinger), the galvanizing story of Eleanor Medill (Cissy) Patterson, celebrated debutante and socialte, scion of the Chicago Tribune empire, and the twentieth century's first woman editor in chief and publisher of a major metropolitan daily newspaper, the Washington Times-Herald. She was called the most powerful woman in America, surpassing Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Clare Boothe Luce, and Dorothy Schiff. Cissy Patterson was from old Republican stock. Her grandfather was Joseph Medill, firebrand abolitionist, mayor of Chicago, editor in chief and principal owner of the Chicago Tribune, and one of the founders of the Republican Party who delivered the crucial Ohio delegation to Abraham Lincoln at the convention of 1860. Cissy Patterson's brother, Joe Medill Patterson, started the New York Daily News. Her pedigree notwithstanding, Cissy Patterson came to publishing shortly before her forty-ninth birthday, in 1930, with almost no practical journalistic or editorial experience and a life out of the pages of Edith Wharton (or more likely the other way around: shades of Cissy are everywhere in the Countess Olenska). Amanda Smith writes that in the summer of 1930, Cissy Patterson, educated at the turn of the century at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, for a vocation of marriage and motherhood and a place in society, took over William Randolph Hearst's foundering Washington Herald and began to learn what others believed she could never grasp—how to run and build up a newspaper. She vividly lived out the Medill family's editorial motto (at least in spirit): "When you grandmother gets raped, put it on the front page." Patterson soon bought from Hearst the Herald's evening sister paper, the Washington Times, merged the two, and became editor, publisher, and sole proprietor of a big-city newspaper, a position almost unprecedented in American history. The effect of the merger was "electric"... By 1945, the Washington Times-Herald, with ten daily editions, was clearing an annual profit of more than $1 million. Amanda Smith, in this huge, fascinating biography gives us the (infamous) life and monumental times of Cissy Patterson, scourge of liberals, advocate of appeasing Hitler, lover of poodles, and hater of FDR. Here is her twentieth-century Washington: its politics and society, scandals and feuds, and at the center—the fierce newspaper wars that consumed and drove the country's press titans, as Patterson took the Washington Times-Herald from a chronic tail-ender in circulation and advertising, ranked fifth in the town, and made it into the most widely read round-the-clock daily in the national's capital, deemed by many to be "the damndest newspaper to ever hit the streets."

Americans Without Law shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on widespread perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which Mark S. Weiner calls “juridical racialism.” The book follows the history of this civic discourse by examining the legal status of four minority groups in four successive historical periods: American Indians in the 1880s, Filipinos after the Spanish-American War, Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, and African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. Weiner reveals the significance of juridical racialism for each group and, in turn, Americans as a whole by examining the work of anthropological social scientists who developed distinctive ways of understanding racial and legal identity, and through decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that put these ethno-legal views into practice. Combining history, anthropology, and legal analysis, the book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences, the growth of national state power, economic modernization, and modern practices of the self.

From a brilliant young legal scholar comes this sweeping history of American ideas of belonging and citizenship, told through the stories of fourteen legal cases that helped to shape our nation. Spanning three centuries, Black Trials details the legal challenges and struggles that helped define the ever-shifting identity of blacks in America. From the well-known cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings to the more obscure trial of Joseph Hanno, an eighteenth-century free black man accused of murdering his wife and bringing smallpox to Boston, Weiner recounts the essential dramas of American identity—illuminating where our conception of minority rights has come from and where it might go. Significant and enthralling, these are the cases that forced the courts and the country to reconsider what it means to be black in America, and Mark Weiner demonstrates their lasting importance for our society.