Winner of the
John Phillip Reid Prize
awarded by the American Society for Legal History
for
the best book in legal history
published during the calendar year 2006
The History of the Supreme Court of the
United States
Volume 12
The Birth of the Modern Constitution:
The United States Supreme Court,
1941-1953
William M. Wiecek
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006
Synopsis:
The Birth of the Modern Constitution recounts the history of
the United States Supreme Court in the momentous yet usually
overlooked years between the constitutional revolution that occurred
in the 1930s and Warren Court judicial activism in the 1950s. The
years 1941-53 saw the emergence of legal liberalism, in the
divergent activist efforts of Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Frank
Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge. The Second World 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 and civil liberties, and reaction to the emergent
national-security state. The Stone and Vinson Courts consolidated
the revolutionary accomplishments of the New Deal and affirmed the
repudiation of classical legal thought but proved unable to provide
a substitute for that powerful legitimating explanatory paradigm of
law. Hence the period bracketed by the dramatic moments of 1937 and
1954, written off as a forgotten time of failure and futility, was
in reality the first phase of modern struggles to define the
constitutional order that will dominate the twenty-first century.
