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When David Souter was nominated by President Bush to the Supreme Court, he cited John Marshall Harlan as his model. It was an interesting choice. Admired by conservatives and deeply respected by his liberal brethren, Harlan was a man, as Justice William Brennan lamented, whose "massive scholarship" ...

When David Souter was nominated by President Bush to the Supreme Court, he cited John Marshall Harlan as his model. It was an interesting choice. Admired by conservatives and deeply respected by his liberal brethren, Harlan was a man, as Justice William Brennan lamented, whose "massive scholarship" has never been fully recognized. In addition, he was the second Harlan to sit on the Court, following his grandfather--also named John Marshall Harlan. But while his grandfather was an outspoken supporter of reconstruction on a conservative court, the younger Harlan emerged as a critic of the Warren Court's liberal expansion of civil liberties. Now, in the first biography of this important but neglected jurist, Tinsley Yarbrough provides a detailed account of Harlan's life, from his privileged childhood to his retirement and death. Yarbrough examines the forces and events which shaped the Justice's jurisprudence--his early life and often complex family relationships, education at Princeton and Oxford, his work as a prosecutor during Prohibition, Republican Party activities, wartime service in the Army Air Force, and years as one of the nation's preeminent corporate lawyers (a career culminating in his defense of the du Pont brothers in the massive DuPont-GM antitrust suit). The book focuses, however, on Harlan's years on the high bench. Yarbrough weaves together discussions of the Justice's relations with his brethren, clerks, and staff, an examination of Harlan's role in the decision-making process on the Court, and an analysis of his jurisprudence. The Justice's approach to constitutional interpretation exalted precedent, deference to governmental power, and narrow decisions closely tied to case facts; but he also accepted an evolving, creative model of constitutional construction which permitted expansive readings of constitutional rights. Yarbrough's details Harlan's close relationship with Justice Frankfurter, showing how--despite their friendship and alliance--Harlan strongly marked out his own position, both personally and judicially, on the Warren and Burger courts. And he examines the substance and significance of his dissents in such famous cases as Miranda and the Pentagon Papers. Intensively researched, smoothly written, and incisively argued, Yarbrough's biography offers an absorbing account of the life and career of a great dissenter, hailed by admirers as a "lawyer's lawyer" and a "judge's judge." Coming at a time when the high court has begun to adopt many of Harlan's principles, this account provides an essential perspective on the Court, civil liberties, and a pivotal figure in the history of both.

A critique of the Warren Court's rulings on welfare in the context of twentieth-century politics.

In 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that the State of Wisconsin was not liable for the brutal beating of a young boy by his father, who had been investigated by the Department of Social Services. Chief ...

A critique of the Warren Court's rulings on welfare in the context of twentieth-century politics.

In 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that the State of Wisconsin was not liable for the brutal beating of a young boy by his father, who had been investigated by the Department of Social Services. Chief Justice William Rehnquist's majority opinion rejected the claim of the boy's mother that her son had been deprived of his constitutional "right to life." Taking this case as her point of departure, Elizabeth Bussiere observes that the idea of a constitutional right to life was first rejected not by the conservative Rehnquist Court but by the liberal Warren Court twenty years earlier. She investigates why the Warren Court, despite its many rulings "entitling" the poor to constitutional protections, refused to identify welfare benefits (or subsistence) as a constitutional right.

Although focused on the Warren Court, the book explores Western political thought from the seventeenth through late twentieth centuries, draws on American social history from the Age of Jackson through the civil rights era of the 1960s, and utilizes current analytic methods, particularly the "new institutionalism." Finding cultural arguments regarding the absence of constitutional welfare rights inadequate, Bussiere illuminates two long-standing traditions -- natural law and maternalism -- that tended to support the poor's subsistence needs. The key to the failure of constitutional welfare rig

Mississippi represented the Old South and all that it stood for perhaps more than any other state. Tracing its long process of economic, social, and cultural evolution, Christopher Morris takes a close look at one of those "typically" Southern communities, Jefferson Davis's Warren County, the ...

Mississippi represented the Old South and all that it stood for perhaps more than any other state. Tracing its long process of economic, social, and cultural evolution, Christopher Morris takes a close look at one of those "typically" Southern communities, Jefferson Davis's Warren County, the northern-most of the five old river counties located in the state's southwestern corner. Drawing on wills, deeds, court records, as well as manuscript materials, Morris shows a transformation of a loosely knit, typically Western community of pioneer homesteaders into a distinctly Southern society based on plantation agriculture, slavery, and a patriarchal social order. Farmers and herders first settled this "western" region around present-day Vicksburg At the turn of the nineteenth century, the wealthiest cattle herders began to acquire slaves and to plant cotton, hastening the demise of the pioneer economy. Gradually, all farmers began to produce for the market, which in turn drew them out of their neighborhoods and away from each other, breaking down local patterns of cooperation. Individuals learned to rely on extended kin-networks as a means of acquiring land and slaves, giving tremendous power to older men with legal control over family property. Relations between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, and planters and yeoman farmers changed with the emergence of the traditional patriarchy of the Old South. This transformation was the "southern" society Warren County's white residents defended in the Civil War.