The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments are the cornerstone of much of American constitutional law. They provide the foundation for the Supreme Court's decisions on issues such as abortion and affirmative action, as well as the authority for a wide variety of important civil rights legislation. It is thus not surprising that the original understanding of those who drafted the amendments remains a hotly debated topic among historians, lawyers, political scientists, politicians, and anyone interested in civil liberties. The so-called Reconstruction Amendments are perhaps the most...

Constitutional theory, Earl Maltz argues, has reached a critical impasse marked by a largely unproductive stalemate between originalists and nonoriginalists regarding the proper role of judicial review. It's time, he says, for both sides to rethink their positions if any hope for a more viable model of judicial review is to be realized. This book is his answer to the dilemma.

Maltz reorients the debate between originalists (those who believe that judges should be bound by the original understanding in constitutional adjudication) and nonoriginalists (those who believe the original...

The slave Dred Scott claimed that his residence in a free state transformed him into a free man. His lawsuit took many twists and turns before making its way to the Supreme Court in 1856. But when the Court ruled against him, the ruling sent shock waves through the nation and helped lead to civil war.

Writing for the 7-to-2 majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney asserted that blacks were not and never could be citizens. Taney also ruled that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, upsetting the balance of slave and free states. Earl Maltz now offers a new look at this landmark...

In The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, 1969-1986, Earl M. Maltz offers a comprehensive summary and analysis of the Supreme Court's impact on American law and government during Burger's tenure. Undoubtedly one of the most interesting periods in Supreme Court history, the Burger Court generally holds a place in America's judicial memory as a centrist or mildly conservative institution that followed the liberal constitutionalism of the Warren Court and preceded the conservative ideology of the Rehnquist Court. Maltz demonstrates, however, that under Burger the Court's ideological transition...

During America's turbulent antebellum era, the Supreme Court decided important cases--most famously Dred Scott--that spoke to sectional concerns and shaped the nation's response to the slavery question. Much scholarship has been devoted to individual cases and to the Taney Court, but this is the first comprehensive examination of the major slavery cases that came before the Court between 1825 and 1861.

Earl Maltz presents a detailed analysis of all eight cases and explains how each fit into the slavery politics of its time, beginning with The Antelope, heard by the John Marshall Court,...

When runaway slave Anthony Burns was tracked to Boston by his owner Charles Suttle, the struggle over his fate became a focal point for national controversy. Boston, a hotbed of antislavery sentiment, provided the venue for the 1854 hearing that determined Burns's legal status, one of the most dramatic and widely publicized events in the long-running conflict over the issue of fugitive slaves.

Earl Maltz's compelling chronicle of this case shows how the violent emotions surrounding it played out at both the local and national levels, focusing especially on the awkward position in which...

Beginning with Brown v. Board of Education and continuing with a series of decisions that, among other things, expanded the reach of the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court that Richard Nixon inherited had presided over a progressive revolution in the law. But by 1972 Nixon had managed to replace four members of the so-called Warren Court with justices more aligned with his own law-and-order conservatism. Nixon's appointees--Warren Burger as Chief Justice and Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist as associate justices--created a politically diverse bench, one that included...