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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chief Justice Marshall's Conservative Nationalism, September 30, 2002
This review is from: John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (Southern Biography) (Hardcover)
John Marshall, our nation's fourth Chief Justice, served from 1801 until 1835. He was appointed by President John Adams in one of the last and most significant acts of his administration. Professor Kent Newmyer has written a comprehensive account of the great Chief Justice's career. The account is admirably researched and documented, drawing extensively on a new edition of Marshall's papers. It includes careful analyses of Marshall's leading opinions. Most importantly, Professor Newmyer gives a thoughtful discussion of Justice Marshall's place on the Court and on the importance of his vision of the United States for our history. The book includes a good discussion of Marshall's role in the Revolutionary War, as a successful lawyer in Virginia, and as a landowner and extensive land speculator. But most of the book consists of a discussion of Marshall's career on the Court, his opinions, and the manner in which he shaped the Court as an institution. While Newmyer admires his subject greatly, I found this a very balanced account. He allows that Justice Marshall did not always meet his own stated goals of separating law from politics and notes how Marshall's activities as a land speculator seemed to play a critical role in several of his leading opinions. The discussion begins with Marbury v Madison and its role in the doctrine of judicial review. It continues with a thorough discussion of Marshall's role in the treason trial of Aaron Burr, through a discussion of the great opinions construing the Commerce Clause and Contracts Clause of the Constitution, through the Cherokee Nation opinions that Marshall wrote near the end of his tenure which established the foundation of American Indian Law. (Professor Newmyer considers these decisions Justice Marshall's proudest moment.) The book considers Marshall's attitudes towards and opinions dealing with slavery. There is also a discussion of a series of polemical articles Justice Marshall exchanged with critics following the decision in McCollough v Maryland. Marshall's critics feared that he was giving too expansive a power to the National Government as opposed to the States. In fact, at the end of his career, Justice Marshall feared his life work had been overtaken by events with the rise of the democracy, a strong state rights movement, and the Presidency of Andrew Jackson. Professor Newmyer sees Justice Marshall as a Burkean conservative in a new world. Marshall interpreted the Constitution broadly, yet flexibility to allow the development of individual, and national commerce and enterprise. Yet he was devoted to institutions and strongly inclined to accept the world as he found it rather than make it over in accordance with abstract principles (as he accused the supporters of the French Revolution of doing.) Newmyer writes: Marshall spoke as a Burkean conservative, or as much of one as American circumstances allowed. He was repelled by reductionist abstractions as well as abstract idealims, even when it was couched, as was much of southern constitutionalism in terms of a mythical past. He worked from the 'given', accepted the world as it was, relished 'the disorder of experience" to borrow a phrase from Charles Rosen." (p.351) Justice Marshall was not an original thinker, but he took the text of the Constitution, together with the Federalist, and molded it and the Court's interpretive role in a way that is with us today. He remains America's great Chief Justice. There is much for the interested reader to learn and to think through in Professor Newmyer's fine study of Justice Marshall.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court, December 14, 2002
This review is from: John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (Southern Biography) (Hardcover)
John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court written by R. Kent Newmyer is a biography about the fourth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Marshall. This is not just an ordinary biography, but a biography with feeling, deep understanding andcomprehensive knowledge of Marshall. This book is, by far, the most extraordinary biography, and paints a portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, the man, with perception and details , at the same time the author does an exhaustive biography of the jurisprudence of the Marshall Court. John Marshall, (1801-1835) was appointed to the Supreme Court by John Adams as he was leaving office. A last minute appointment and second cousin to Thomas Jefferson, Marshall served in some of the most formative years that the has ever seen. Marshall wanted to bring the court into the central picture of the government and reigned in the court from the fringes of government, Consolidating the authority of the court making the Supreme Court the final arbitor when it came to constitutional. John Marshall was a man equal to Jefferson when it came to the challenges of office and was equally skilled at the crafting law that supported the emerging American market economy. It was Jefferson and Marshall, however who symbolized and personalized the competing constitutional persuasions of the age and brought them into explosive focus. Each had taken a stand on the great foreign and domestic issues of the 1790's; each had conflated those issues into a dispute over the meaning of the Constitution. When fate and ambition made Jefferson president and Marshall chief justice, the institutional stage was set for what is one of the most creative confrontations in American constitutional history. At stake was not just the position of the Supreme Court in American government but the place of law in republican culture. Can you imagine being there when Marshall was giving the oath of office to Jefferson... when the new chief justice administered the oath of office to the new president on March 4, 1801. With his hand on the Bible held by Marshall, Jefferson swore to uphold the Constitution, Marshall was sure sure he was about to destroy. This book has an engaging narrative and you seem to read the information quickly and with ease, the author's prose is extremely well-written. As for the historical information it is spot-on even the court cases are found on a listing in the back of the book. Marshall was more than a chief justice, he was priciple in the forming a United States. Marshall's institutional accomplishments are found in this impressive study. For a one volume book... this is the most comprehensive... Marshall was the most representative figure in American law. This book is well worth the money ans should be in the library of all who study American History.
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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A great Marshall biogaphy is yet to be written, December 29, 2006
This review is from: John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (Southern Biography) (Hardcover)
Maybe I'm getting spoiled with the recent output of historical profiles that have the narrative quality of great fiction, like Caro's LBJ series, Chernow on Hamilton, and McCullough's books on our founding. Given that high bar, Newmyer's history of Marshall is a very difficult read.
This book plods along. When discussing a principle the court dealt with Newmyer often makes it impossible to keep track of what year or even decade he's referring to, making it difficult to put the principles discussed into the proper context, especially political context. I also felt the book was very biased, glorifying his conservative nationalism without really defining why his brand of nationalism should be considered conservative rather than liberal or even non-ideological.
This book would prove helpful in a Constitutional Law class discussing certain principles and their historical development, especially the rise of Corporations, but only with the guidance of a Professor who knows the era and Marshall's court well and only in small doses. I'm a sucker for books about our founding ideals and the history of our framers, but this was torture and with no obligation to finish this book, I finally gave up about ¾ of the way through, which I rarely do.
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