Customer Reviews

A People's History of the Supreme Court: The Men and Women Whose Cases and Decisions Have Shaped OurConstitution: Revised Edition

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I am struggling with my reactions to this book. I have several serious criticisms of the book, but I think many things were well done. Let me first list the positives and then all the negatives.

A People's History of the Supreme Court gives a brief biography of every justice who has ever served on the Supreme Court and interwoven with this, gives a description of some of the most important cases the Supreme Court has decided. In the case descriptions, the author explains, in plain language, the legal issues involved (I think it's plain language, but I'm a lawyer, and law school is very good at teaching lawyers not to speak or understand plain language). He also often describes the history of the legal issue, why it was important to the nation, what the country thought of the legal issue at the time. Finally, he gives a brief story of the actual case itself--who the parties were, why they decided to file the suit, why they appealed their case all the way to the Supreme Court, etc.

This is all very important stuff. It is great to have it all collected into one book. Too often, we don't know anything about the people who bring their cases to the Supreme Court but merely know their names. It is important to remember that the cases involved real people with real disputes or heartfelt issues that they wanted the court to resolve.

We also know almost nothing about the Supreme Court justices who preceded this one. But they are, in many ways, as powerful or more powerful than the Presidents. They had real-world experience before becoming judges and sometimes cast aside that experience, but sometimes didn't.

I found the book extremely interesting and read it quickly from cover to cover.

But the book had many flaws: there are factual errors. Some are described in previous reviews. One that I found is that the author incorrectly describes the purposes and text of the 12th Amendment when discussing the Hayes-Tilden election in the late 19th Century. So, although it is important to know everything that is in this book, a reader can't always trust that he or she is getting correct information.

Second, I do not have a problem, as others do, that the author states his political views early and often in this book. I agree with the author that it is better for the author to be honest and forthright about biases and let the reader decide if he or she agrees with the author than for the author to pretend to be completely unbiased. My problem is that the author often distorts the record of justices to fit with his opinion of them--an unforgivable sin.

For instance, Irons believes that the first Justice Harlan is a great justice. So he describes his opinion dissenting to oppose segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson as a great opinion, but does not even allude to the fact that, in the middle of this great opinion, he hurls racial insults at, as Harlan describes it, the "Chinese race." His views of some of our earliest justices, Story and John Marshall are cramped because he wants to tear them down.

Third, I think Irons should have left out the first couple of chapters on the framing of the Constitution. It is a bit tangential to the subject matter of the book and has been done better by more serious historians.

Finally, Irons misses the biggest story of the late 20th Century with a cop out. He ends his book in 1992 but publishes the book in 1999. Between 1992 and 1999, the Supreme Court did a great many things--basically reviving doctrines that had been abandoned in the 1930s. Perhaps Irons got tired and after researching for several years, decided not to add a whole chapter on the revolutionary Rehnquist Court. But if so, he should have explained that to us. Instead, he cops out and says that nothing important has happened since 1992.

All in all, if you are interested in the Supreme Court, you should read this book. My guess is that you will find it an easy read and be very interested in it, but wind up frustrated with Irons.

Irons has put together a useful and well-written history of the Supreme Court from its genesis in the Constitutional Convention to the present. His short profiles of each justice and his (or her) contribution are particularly helpful. He also does a great job of bringing to life many of the individual litigants who came before the court, putting faces on the names from the past. Unfortunately, in history itself he seems to have lost his way. One will find laughers like that Lincoln dismissed McClellan after the disastrous defeat at Antietam in Virginia that a sixth grader wouldn't make (it was in Maryland, it was at least a tactical victory and Lincoln kept McClellan for another two months). He places too much emphasis on black-white relations, which while important were not the only thing the Supreme Court did in the nineteenth century. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the trail of tears case, is nowhere present, even though it led to the largest confrontation between the power of a president and of the court in our history. In the context of their times, the cases in which the court struck down the civil war income tax and dealt with the constitutionality of greenbacks were also important, but are barely touched on. He starts well, with good descriptions of Charles River Bridge and Gibbons v. Ogden; I wish he'd continued as comprehensively.

Peter Iron's book, A People's History of the Supreme Court, was a joy to read through all the many hours I was engrossed in this immense book. He puts his ideological cards on the table in the introduction and then, if you have any spark of liberal spirit inside you, you go along for the ride as Irons takes the reader through over two hundred years of siginificant cases of the Supreme Court. The great pleasure of this book is that it also allows the reader to see the personalities of both the court and the petitioners before the court. Dred Scott becomes more than the name of the decision. It is fascinating, too, how politics and legal decisions are weaved together in this epic book as they are in the actual decisions themselves. It was a wonderful book that demonstrated that the Constitution is for the people and the story of the Constitution is the story of the people.

Don't kid yourself into thinking that this is a disinterested history of the Supreme Court of the United States. It isn't, it is a highly politicized look at the history of the cases heard before the highest court in the land, with a special emphasis on the cases that dealt directly with individual rights. The Dred Scott decision, which reinforced the slavery and Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion both get a lot of play in this book. As do lesser known cases involving the internment of American's of Japanese decent, and early cases involving slavery issues such as the little known Antelope case.

It's a well written book, full of telling details about not only the justices who heard these cases, but also the people behind the case names. We learn what Earl Warren, the Chief Justice during some of the most important years in the court's history was like as a person. But we also learn about Earl Gideon, the man whose case created the right to an attorney for anyone arrested for a crime.

Still, while I appreciate the need for a progressive history of the Supreme Court, I wish Iron's had played down his politics a little more. A more evenhanded approach that did not disparage everyone who does not share Iron's politics would have made for a better, and more convincing book.

While Irons' book may not hit every key case we're taught to revere in ConLaw, he puts together an interesting and readable history of the Court that helps put faces with the names we've been hearing since high school history class. While he's political in his writing, Irons also acknowledges the political nature of the Court and presents the facts in as unbiased a manner as anyone else might. His presentations of each justice are especially interesting, particularly the way he examines Earl Warren thundering at lawyers arguing that the governor of Arkansas could dissent from a Court ruling, William Brennan's long career of upholding human rights, and the way he reveals Chief Justice Rehnquist's shameful lack of respect for human dignity. Should be a must-read this election season and beyond.

Peter Irons is an ardent patriot. He believes passionately in the founding promises of America as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights: "all men are created equal" - "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for all people - "justice for all" - "promote the General welfare" - "no law respecting an establishment of religion....or abridging the freedom of speech." With these ideals always in mind, Irons is not hesitant about passing judgement on America and the Americans, in this book on the Supreme Court, when actions are committed or decisions made which fail to fulfill these promises. In other words, Irons is not an impartial, neutral historian. If the reader has dissimilar understandings of the founding promises, she or he may react hostilely to A People's History of the Supreme Court. But that reader especially should make the effort to suspend judgement and read on. This is a very fine book even if you disagree with it. Irons knows his judicial history well, and he explains the issues of important Supreme Court decisions with amazing clarity. He also treats the key personalities of Supreme Court history with respect, recognizing the greatness even of Justices whose opinions had unfortunate consequences. The only justices he scorns are those who made no contribution.

The first seven chapters of the book describe the battles and compromises that went into the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and thereafter into the establishment of the first Supreme Court. We hear a lot about the "intentions" of the founding fathers these days; Irons analyzes what we can and can't be sure of, concerning those intentions, with masterful support from the available sources. He establishes very convincingly that from the start America has been polarized over the intertwined issues of racism and the proper balance of federal authority versus states' rights. Irons clearly defends his interpretation of the Constitution as a document establishing federal authority, but yielding fatal compromises with the usually less-than-admirable demands of states with peculiar institutions. Slavery is of course the biggest and most fatal such compromise, the one that most threatened to destroy the efforts of the Constitution-writers, and the one that the Supreme Court failed to resolve in keeping with the founding promises for the longest time - not making much progress until the Warren Court.

Irons plainly believes that "states' rights" has most frequently been a pretext for reneging on those founding promises of justice and equality. He makes a very good case throughout the book that the federal government has frequently operated just as Madison hoped in his Federalist essays, eventually though painfully imposing justice for all when one or several states denied justice to some. The implication is that the federal government, with its awkward checks and balances, is indeed the guardian of the Constitution and of the American aspirations of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The very best section of the book is Section IV: Liberty in a Social Organization. These seven chapters deal with economic justice, beginning with the distressing misuse of the 14th Amendment by the courts and the Supreme Court to impose a feudal system of employer/employee relations on the whole country, to legislate a "laissez-faire" ideology from the bench. Irons makes no bones, by the way, in finding that the Court has always been staffed with "activist" justices. The turning point in modernizing economic democracy - in fulfilling the promise of promoting the General welfare - comes in the New Deal court confrontations between the "horsemen of reaction" and the agents of reform. FDR's threat of `stacking the court' is usually portrayed as one of his most embarrassing failures, but Irons sees it rather as a piece of the drama, an effective tactic perhaps, of compelling the Court to change its ways, to stop representing only the economic interests of capitalists and to address the needs of the whole American people. Irons is not waging a propaganda campaign, however. His accounts of the crucial Court decisions of the 1930s outline the arguments for both sides with precision and balance.

Section V presents the remarkable tale of the Supreme Court turning its attention from issues of property and labor rights to issues of civil liberties. This is the drama of our lifetimes, isn't it? Obviously Irons is fully partisan to the promise of "liberty and justice for all, but once again he depicts the conflicts on the Supreme Court with marvelous clarity.

Section VI will inevitably offend those readers who define themselves as conservative. It narrates the demise of the great consensus of the Warren Court and the subsequent bitter division of the Supreme Court from Nixon to Clinton. Irons quite openly regards the Republican appointed reactionary justices as attempting to renege once more on those lovely founding promises. Still I urge conservative readers to let Irons make his case before ranting against it. He writes very well. It's an entertaining book to hate, if that's your choice after reading it.

This book provides and excellent introduction to the Supreme Court. This particular book approaches the Supreme Court's history through the lives of the individuals at the center of many landmark decisions. This includes the Justices, the individuals who brought the cases, and even the politicians of the time.

The outcome of this approach is a history that doesn't simply provide a dry reading of the facts of a number of legal cases; instead, Irons' approach addresses the relevance of the cases to the above mentioned individuals which also helps develop a sense of the Court's importance in the development of the Nation.

Lastly, while I find Irons' book to be a good read and a good introduction, I must concur with an earlier reviewer who accuses Irons of allowing his personal politics too much sway. While I do not have the legal knowledge to discuss the factual issues, it is clear from the outset that Irons elevates those justices whose opinions are aligned with his own viewpoint and disparages others who aren't.

However, in spite of Irons' biases, the book provides an excellent view of the Supreme Court, and I would recommend it to anyone trying get a grasp of what the Court is all about.

In this book, Peter Irons offers a refreshingly stimulating interpretation of the history of the Supreme Court. His approach, which focuses on understanding the personalities on the bench and behind the cases, serves as an invaluable reminder that laws and created and interpreted by people who bring their views and experiences into this process. Irons begins this process with himself; in the introduction he expresses his belief that "the Constitution's basic command is that every person must be accorded the dignity he or she deserves as a human being."(xv) This view serves as the basis for his analysis in the book.

Irons divides the history of the Court into six parts. The first section looks at the prehistory of American law, the period before the ratification of the American constitution. He starts with the colonial era, focusing on the New England region to the exclusion of the other areas. While this distorts a more complete understanding of the broader background, it does allow Irons to more clearly identify ideas and doctrines that are relevant to today's jurisprudential issues. His account of the Constitutional Convention is more rote; all the classic debates are recounted, from the Great Compromise to the arguments over the enumerated powers of the government.

It is with the discussion of the beginning of the Court that Irons' narrative comes to life and the pattern of the remainder of the book emerges. In presenting the history of the Court Irons concentrates his account on specific cases that best illustrate his argument. Though episodic, this provides for a clearer presentation of the evolution of the Court's overall jurisprudence over time. This is evident from the first with his analysis of John Marshall. Irons sees the Court initially focusing on questions of property rights, of which Marshall was a stanch defender. Such defense often came at the expense of the rights of debtors, farmers, and African Americans, though Marshall excelled at writing opinions that advanced his interpretations while depriving opponents of any grounds on which to launch political challenges.

The enshrining of property rights also provided critical legal support in defending the institution of slavery. The legal battles surrounding slavery and its aftermath occupied the Court for most of the middle third of the 19th century and comprise the third section of Irons' book. Here the author focuses on Marshall's replacement, Roger B. Taney, as the main character in his account, stressing the fundamentally racist (and in Irons' opinion, unexamined) views that lay behind Taney's flawed legal defense of slavery. Irons' account of the Dred Scott case is one of the best parts of the book, offering a good introduction to the people behind one of the most controversial decisions in the Court's history. By contrast, his discussion of the Court's jurisprudence stemming from the Civil War is one of the its most disappointing sections, while his analysis of the Reconstruction-era cases over civil rights focuses more on the legislative efforts and constitutional amendments passed than on the Court's role in limiting the extension of the rights supposedly granted by these measures.

With the Civil War resolving the issue of slavery (if not that of the role of blacks in American life), the Court's docket was increasingly occupied with cases involving economic rights. Irons' coverage of these issues comprises the fourth section of his book. The Court he chronicles during this period was comprised of unabashed defenders of business interests who consistently limited government's ability to regulate economic activity. Irons attributes these views to the backgrounds and connections of the justices of the period, most of whom were former railroad attorneys who maintained (unethical) connections with private interests. The generally conservative mentality also prevailed in matters of civil liberties, where opponents of unabashed capitalism fell victim to laws passed during World War I that made disloyal speech illegal - laws that were generally upheld by the Court.

It was only during the New Deal of the 1930s and the aftermath of President Franklin Roosevelt's "court-packing" plan that the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court changed course and endorsed governmental regulation of the economy. This opened a new era in Supreme Court jurisprudence, one focusing more on cases involving individual rights rather than on economic matters, and is the subject of the final two sections of his book. Here the author is in his element, having written on civil liberties before (and even being directly involved in the history of one of the topics he chronicles, that of the Japanese internments) and his solid narrative ends the book on a strong note.

Irons' interpretative lens offers a refreshingly different account of the history of the Court. Whereas previous historians have often written about the Court as if it were a faceless entity dispensing legal philosophy, Irons shows how the justices' preconceived legal and political ideologies often shaped the law. While some readers may disagree with Irons' ideological perspective, it does introduce a much-needed perspective into examining the impact of the Court in the context of its times. Yet Irons' work is undermined by the poor editing of the book. The text is plagued with historical inaccuracies which, though minor, often create doubts as to the veracity of the broader argument. Even more egregious is the poor job in checking the endnotes, with the reader often forced to comb through the bibliography in search of the full listing of the work cited. Again, while relatively minor, it suggests a slapdash quality that can undermine the broader insights of the book.

Such problems require the reader to treat this book with a degree of wariness. Nonetheless, Irons has written an engaging account of the history of the Supreme Court, one that stimulates the reader and helps them to better understand the role of the Court in shaping the development of the nation - and how it continues to influence us today.

This book is not nearly as poignant as its inspiration, Zinn's A People's History of the United States. While Zinn's title will anger friends of the corporate world, millionaires, and the hopelessly-stuck-in-the-middle-class individuals who amazingly follow them, Iron's book is more objective.

The major strengths of the book are: the short biographies and stories of the people involved in the cases and the justices (how many people actually know who Plessy was?); a professional and informative, but not academic, writing style that will not alienate 99% of the public (hint: if you see a history book written by a professor, put it down and look for another - they write for other professors and themselves, not to add anything significant to the field of history); and the introduction detailing how the Constitution was created -- quite possibly the best telling of the story I have ever read.

Overall, a very good book and an ideal introduction to a history of the Supreme Court.

As a retired Judicial Officer I was very pleased with the presentation by Professor Irons. The book is written in a manner that regardless of your understanding of the law and Supreme Court decisions it will hold your interest. Since that reading I have bought his other books and even a course of his on DVD through The Teaching Company.

We are not only presented with crucial decisions but the reasons, good or bad, for that conclusion. This occurs with the additional reward of what social and poltical forces help shape these decisions.

The book is easily readible and extremely informative. I suggest this for those interested in quality writing, history, sociology and the law..
I wish this was required reading for all high school students.......