This book examines the ideology of elite lawyers and judges from the Gilded Age through the New Deal. Between 1866 and 1937, a coherent outlook shaped the way the American bar understood the sources of law, the role of the courts, and the relationship between law and the larger society. William M. Wiecek explores this outlook--often called "legal orthodoxy" or "classical legal thought"--which assumed that law was apolitical, determinate, objective, and neutral.

American classical legal thought was forged in the heat of the social crises that punctuated the late nineteenth century. Fearing...

This book examines the ideology of elite lawyers and judges from the Gilded Age through the New Deal. Between 1866 and 1937, a coherent outlook shaped the way the American bar understood the sources of law, the role of the courts, and the relationship between law and the larger society. William M. Wiecek explores this outlook--often called "legal orthodoxy" or "classical legal thought"--which assumed that law was apolitical, determinate, objective, and neutral.

American classical legal thought was forged in the heat of the social crises that punctuated the late nineteenth century....

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 war and early Cold War years of the Court in reality marked the birth of the constitutional order that dominated American public law in the later twentieth century. That legal outlook emphasized judicial concern for civil rights, civil liberties, and reaction to the emergent national security state. This book recounts the history of United States Supreme Court in the momentous yet usually overlooked years between the constitutional...

Liberty under Law is a concise and readable history of the U.S. Supreme Court, from its antecedents in colonial and British legal tradition to the present.