The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800


Book Description

In the 1930s a band of smart and able young men, some still in their twenties, helped Franklin D. Roosevelt transform an American nation in crisis. They were the junior officers of the New Deal. Thomas G. Corcoran, Benjamin V. Cohen, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, and James Rowe helped FDR build the modern Democratic Party into a progressive coalition whose command over power and ideas during the next three decades seemed politically invincible. This is the first book about this group of Rooseveltians and their linkage to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Vietnam War debacle. Michael Janeway grew up inside this world. His father, Eliot Janeway, business editor of Time and a star writer for Fortune and Life magazines, was part of this circle, strategizing and practicing politics as well as reporting on these men. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of events and previously unavailable private letters and other documents, Janeway crafts a riveting account of the exercise of power during the New Deal and its aftermath. He shows how these men were at the nexus of reform impulses at the electoral level with reform thinking in the social sciences and the law and explains how this potent fusion helped build the contemporary American state. Since that time efforts to reinvent government by "brains trust" have largely failed in the U.S. In the last quarter of the twentieth century American politics ceased to function as a blend of broad coalition building and reform agenda setting, rooted in a consensus of belief in the efficacy of modern government. Can a progressive coalition of ideas and power come together again? The Fall of the House of Roosevelt makes such a prospect both alluring and daunting.




The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800: The justices on circuit, 1790-1794


Book Description

Volume 2 details the workings of the Court's experimental practice of sending Justices around the country to serve as judges at sessions of the various federal circuit courts. The documents in this volume reveal that the justices quickly voiced bitter complaints about the demands of their circuit duties. They also questioned the propriety--and perhaps constitutionality--of assigning the same individuals to act as superior and inferior court judges. The documents in this volume also touch upon topics that figured prominently in the law and politics of the era: neutrality, the boundary between state and federal crimes, the constitutional prohibition against impairing the obligations of contracts, and the relationship between law and morality.




Federal Justice in the Mid-Atlantic South


Book Description

Also probed is the part played by the early federal courts in America's neutrality-based foreign policy and in promoting economic enterprise by affording national forums for credit transactions, for corporations, for patent claimants, for those who suffered losses on the sea including maritime labor, and for real property owners and claimants. Political and social control issues, some of historic significance, reached the courts in the mid-Atlantic South. Professor Fish treats the national security impulses that dominated the seditious libel trial of James Callender, the treason trial of Aaron Burr, and the trials of numerous privateers-pirates for violating the nation's piracy and neutrality laws including the first capital case heard by a regularly constituted circuit court. The author explores judges' invocation of higher law, their embrace of a common law of crimes and their perplexity in construing uncertain language in statutes prohibiting the international slave trade.







The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800: pt. 1. Appointments and proceedings


Book Description

Volume one presents documents that establish the structure of the Supreme Court and recount the official record of the Court's activity during its first decade. It serves as an introduction and reference tool for the subsequent volumes in the series.











Book Description