Some Recent Books about the Supreme Court
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1957.tb00965.x |
| Author | Geoffrey Marshall |
| Published date | 01 June 1957 |
| Date | 01 June 1957 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
186
NOTES AND REVIEW ARTICLES
violent transformation
of
the European sccne in the next few years, chiefly lies in putting
itself at the head
of
the bewildering number of European organs which have sprung up in
the last decade, many having been mooted in the Council itself. The possibility
of
the
Council being
able
to do this is somewhat slender at the moment.
For
all
their obvious
weaknesses, international organizations soon acquire an
e.rprit
de
corps
and cherish such
independence as they possess.
SOME RECENT
BOOKS
ABOUT THE
SUPREME COURT’
GEOFFREY MARSHALL
Nu
field
Callrpge, Oxford
HOWEVER republican the constitution there is a divinity which hedges judicial decision
and which somehow sets it apart from the transparent, understandable and mercly human
operations of the legislative and executive branches
of
government. One way of expelling
the magic is at the philosophical level, another at the biographical. At both levels American
writers have led the ficld. The legal ‘realists’ have indicted ‘rule-fctichism’ at the same time
as
sociologists, professional journalists, and the ex law-clerks of Supreme Court Justices
have provided a stream of biographical and analytic material. That an American publishing
firm is able to put out a paper-back serics devoted to judges and jurisprudcnce is sympto-
matic.
A
series of Pelican books on Famous British Judges might make its way
if
it
were
to concentrate on the more spectacular episodes in the history
of
the criminal
law.
Liversidge
v.
Anderson
and its like may show
a
profit
in
Chancery Lane, but not at
Harmondsworth.
In ‘Mr. Justice’, nine Supreme Court judges (Holmes, Marshall, Stone, Brandeis, Bradley,
Sutherland, Hughes, Rutledge, and Taney)
are
digested and presented
by
contributors
of
whom the majority have
also
written full-length studies
of
their subjects. The editors deny
any intention of producing
a
‘nutshell’ book
or
‘miming the recent popular trend towards
condensation’; and their claim is substantially justified. Perhaps understandably one is left
with
a
strong sense
of
judicial virtue at the close. The essayists
offer
few dissenting judge-
ments, and where criticism has to
be
made, hasten to redress the balance. On occasion this
gives
a
flavour of inconsistency.
Rlr.
Justice Sutherland,
for
example, is said to have had
‘a
compartmentalised mind’, to have ‘stored each problem away in
a
separate portion of the
brain’ and to have been
‘a
man ncccssarily deprived
of
the large view, unable to see a
problem in its relationship to other problems and thus unable to make the generalisations
on
which the law depends’. Yet
a
page later we
are
told that he had
a
‘penchant for legal
and political theory’, and that ‘his habit
of
deciding cases from the view-point of
a
rounded
theory stood him in good stead’. (His theory,
it
is added, was sometimes ‘inadequate’.)
MR. JUSTICE
(ed. by)
ALLISON
DUNHAM
and
PHILIP
B.
KURLAND.
(Cambridge University
THE HOLMES READER
(ed. by)
JULIUS
J.
MARKE.
(Docket Series, Oceana Pitblications.
THE BRANDEIS READER
(ed.
hy)
ERVIN
H.
POLLACK.
(Docket Series.)
SECURITY THROUGH FREEDOM.
By
ALPHEUS
THOMAS
MASON.
(Cornell University
VAGARIES AND VARIETIES IN CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION.
By
Press.
for
University
of
Chicago
Press.
Pp.
241.
28s.)
New
York.
$1.00.)
Press,
Ithoca,
New
York.
Pp.
232.
$2.90.)
THOMAS REED POWELL.
(Colrtmbia University Press.
Pp.
229.
$3.50.)
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