THE COURT AND WE

...3.50...

...and Mason is McCormick professor of jurisprudence in Princeton's political science department...

...Smith teaches history at U.C.L.A...

...He was much more important as a politician, as one of those who nursed a new nation to health...

...While Smith's book on James Wilson is not on this scale, it is a welcome addition to our growing shelf of competent judicial biographies...

...We have long been in debt to Mason for his great book on Justice Brandeis...

...Charles Page Smith's study of James Wilson, a member of the original Court, and Alpheus Thomas Mason's biography of Harlan Stone fill two large gaps in the history of the institution...

...Overtones of this ancient controversy are reflected in Brown's peevish book (Charles Beard and the Constitution), which seeks to tear apart one of the most influential books ever published by an historian, Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913...

...this immigrant son of a Scottish farmer went to the top of the legal profession in Pennsylvania, and must be accounted one of the authentic Founding Fathers...

...For power without criticism is dangerous, and without criticism mistakes will be made or be allowed to go on uncorrected...

...Beard undertook to establish that the clash over the ratification of the Constitution was mainly, though not entirely, a conflict of competing economic interests...

...Ramaswamy's little book, The Creative Role of the Supreme Court of the United States, consisting of three lectures given at Stanford in November 1955, has little to say about our Constitution that hasn't already been said more competently by others...

...I doubt whether there was as much of a commitment to democracy in Wilson's views as Smith suggests, for what he seems to forget is that the Federalist insistence that the national government rests upon the will of the people of the United States emanated not from any particular love for the people, but rather from a desire to prove that the central government did not rest upon the consent of the states...

...The history of the Supreme Court is largely the history of the justices who have sat there...

...Some of this book is hard reading, for several of the chapters on the big cases are extremely technical, but in general this is an absorbing tale...

...Charles Beard and the Constitution, by Robert E. Brown...

...426 pp...

...This is especially true of our public law, and particularly that branch of the law which deals with interpretation of the Constitution...

...Since it possesses a tremendous amount of power, like all centers of power in a democratic society it should be subjected to continuous, widespread, and informed criticism...

...While he was an economic conservative he did not believe that the Constitution closed the door to other economic views...

...It is indeed regrettable that there is so little understanding of constitutional law problems because the American courts, in exercising judicial review powers, are repositories of enormous authority...

...Princeton University Press...

...7.50...

...In 1942 President Roosevelt elevated him to the Chief Justiceship, a post he held at the time of his death in 1946...

...Reviewed by David Fellman IT IS unfortunate that so many laymen look upon the law as an inscrutable mystery which only lawyers and judges can hope to comprehend...

...217 pp...

...We do not know enough about the give-andtake of argument among judges before the final opinion is published, and Mason has enriched our knowledge of such matters by telling us a great many things that are either normally left unsaid or are unknown...

...At the same time it was Stone who launched the doctrine that First Amendment liberties of conscience have a preferred position in our constitutional law, thus shifting the normal presumption, which is in favor of legislation, against legislation which trespasses upon these liberties...

...For Mason is not only a good writer and a hard worker...

...Wilson, too, rose from rags to riches, from obscurity to greatness...

...It is a story of grandeur and despair, and it was high time that some one undertook to tell it...

...The three lectures deal with the role of the U.S...

...He was a leader in Pennsylvania politics, where he championed conservative causes, an outstanding member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most vocal debaters in the Convention of 1787 that wrote the Constitution, and a member of the original Supreme Court from 1789 until his death in 1798...

...While Beard's evidence may have been insufficient on this or that detail, it is simply ludicrous to reject out of hand the notion that there is a great deal of determinism in history of the sort that Beard described...

...In denying this thesis Brown seeks to refute not only the general argument but almost every statement or point that Beard made...

...Unfortunately he was a plunger in land speculation on an almost fantastic scale, and died a bankrupt hiding out from his creditors to avoid arrest...

...The Creative Role of the United States, by M. Ramaswamy...

...The Supreme Court, however, did not have much important business in these early years, and while it is clear that Wilson was a Federalist nationalist, his contribution to the law was not weighty...

...The argument that the Constitution stemmed from the will of the people of the United States has always been the antidote to the notion that it was merely a compact among sovereign states...

...The Federalist Founding Fathers were nationalists, not democrats, and their greatest political problem was to reduce the stature of the states so that the national government might function effectively...

...While some branches of private law are complex and technical, and require hard work to be understood, most fields of law are within the reach of normal minds if a reasonable effort of study is made...

...University of North Carolina Press...

...Supreme Court in connection with the Constitution, federalism and civil liberties, and focus largely on analysis of well-known leading cases...

...While Justice Stone was conservative in his private system of economic and political values, and a great admirer of Herbert Hoover, he also championed the doctrine of judicial self-restraint, in the tradition of Justice Holmes, a tradition for which Justice Frankfurter is the chief spokesman today...

...Judicial restraint means that Stone could vote to sustain legislation of which he did not approve personally on policy grounds, and for which he would not have voted if he had been a member of the legislative body...

...The life story o£ Stone is a bit of authentic Americana—from humble farm to greatness—with his adult life divided about equally between teaching law at Columbia, much of the time as its dean, and sitting on the Court, to which President Coolidge appointed him in 1925 after a brief tour of duty as Attorney General...

...If they are to do their best work the judges must be judged by an informed people...

...No fresh insights are suggested, and the author makes the all too familiar mistake of assuming that the Constitution is interpreted only by the judges...

...This was the best kind of conservatism, since respect for such rights of conscience of those of freedom of religion and speech is one of our oldest national commitments...

...The author is Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court of India...

...Our debt is now incalculable, for by almost every standard of judgment his life of Chief Justice Stone is a monumental work of scholarship...

...There are some who think that it is indiscreet or in bad taste to do so, but I do not agree...

...Since most of this biography is concerned with Stone's service on the Court—Mason gets him on the Court by page 200—the book is in large measure a survey of constitutional law from 1925 to 1946, surely one of the most exciting and important periods of legal controversy and change...

...As a leading "pillar of the law" Stone was entitled to a study of such proportions and such profound insights...

...This is particularly true of the Supreme Court of the United States, which in our federal system speaks the last judicial word on the meaning of the Constitution...

...While Smith's rather labored effort to build up Wilson as a great legal thinker doesn't really come off, since Wilson did not have a particularly interesting or original mind, this is an absorbing history...

...138 pp...

...And there was nothing flabby about Stone's devotion to these freedoms...

...Above all, it sheds new light on early Pennsylvania politics, both during and after the war, and upon the practice of law in those days...

...While the average layman is understandably reluctant to study formal treatises about the law, there is much to be learned, quite painlessly, through the reading of histories and judicial biographies...

...he is also a first-rate student of constitutional law...

...Thus he ignores the impact of executive and legislative policy upon constitutional interpretation...

...In cases of reasonable doubt I think the author is right to err on the side of getting the facts into the fullest possible record, rather than suppress them...

...Stanford University Press...

...This is regrettable, since the Constitution is a living instrument, to the interpretation of which all agencies of government, and the people, organized and unorganized, make their respective contributions...

...With complete access to Stone's papers—and it would appear that Stone threw nothing away—Mason is able to disclose details concerning the decisionmaking process among the Justices never heretofore explored...

...He may have been wrong here or there—a point which he cheerfully conceded—but he was not all wrong, as Brown seems to argue...

...All this is described by Mason with an extraordinary richness of detail which reaches into the intimate communications that passed between members of the Court...