John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court presents a portrait of US Supreme Court justice John McKinley (1780 1852) and provides a penetrating analysis of McKinley s time and place, the exigencies of his circuit work, and the contributions he made to both American legal history and Alabama.Steven P. Brown rescues from obscurity John McKinley, one of the three Alabama justices, along with John Archibald Campbell and Hugo Black, who have served on the US Supreme Court. A native Kentuckian who moved in 1819 to northern Alabama as a land speculator and lawyer, McKinley was elected to...