The History of the Supreme Court of the United States

A history of the United States Supreme Court between 1941 and 1953.

William M. Wiecek (Author)

9780521848206, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 January 2006

752 pages, 32 b/w illus.
24.1 x 16.1 x 4.4 cm, 1.164 kg

"The cases that Wiecek chooses to write about he covers well and illuminatingly."
- Law and History Review

The Birth of the Modern Constitution recounts the history of the United States Supreme Court in the momentous yet usually overlooked years between the constitutional revolution in the 1930s and Warren-Court judicial activism in the 1950s. 1941–1953 marked the emergence of legal liberalism, in the divergent activist efforts of Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge. The Stone/Vinson Courts consolidated the revolutionary accomplishments of the New Deal and affirmed the repudiation of classical legal thought, but proved unable to provide a substitute for that powerful legitimating explanatory paradigm of law. Hence the period bracketed by the dramatic moments of 1937 and 1954, written off as a forgotten time of failure and futility, was in reality the first phase of modern struggles to define the constitutional order that will dominate the twenty-first century.

Part I. The Roosevelt Court: 1. American Public Law in 1941
2. A new Court
3. Carolene Products (1938): prism of the Stone Court
Part II. First Amendment Freedoms: 4. Freedom of speech in the Stone Court
5. Freedom of speech in the Vinson Court
6. The free exercise of religion
7. The establishment of religion
Part III. World War Two and the Constitution: 8. Total war and the constitution
9. Military courts and treason
10. Silent Leges: Japanese internment
11. National authority during and after the war
Part IV. The Truman Court: 12. The Truman Court
13. American jurisprudence after the war: 'reason called law'
14. The problem of incorporation
15. Adamson v. California (1947): prism of the Vinson Court
Part V. The Cold War: 16. Anticommunism and the Cold War: Dennis v. United States
17. The Cold War cases
Part VI. Civil Rights: 18. Civil Rights and the Stone Court
19. Civil Rights and the Vinson Court.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], History of the Americas [HBJK]