The History of the Supreme Court of the United States

This is a history of the United States Supreme Court between 1941 and 1953. Its principal objective is to explain the major issues facing the Court in mid-century to a general audience that includes lawyers but is aimed at a wider readership. These issues include Japanese-American internment during the war, the rights of African-Americans as the old order of Jim Crow disintegrated, the definition of religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and protection for speech freedom amidst national anxieties spawned by global war and Cold War rivalries.

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.

A history of the United States Supreme Court in the momentous yet usually overlooked years between the 1930s and 1950s. This period, written off as a time of failure and futility, was in reality the first phase of modern struggles to define the constitutional order of the twenty-first century.

William M. Wiecek is a Professor of Law and Professor of History at Syracuse University, where he has been teaching since 1985. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an LL.B from Harvard University. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including most recently, The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886–1937 (Oxford University Press, 1998), The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1992), and American Legal History: Cases and Materials, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1996). He has published articles in such journals as the Supreme Court Review, the Journal of Supreme Court History, Rutgers Law Journal, Cardozo Law Review, the American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of American History.