Era Of The Oath
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Era of the Oath
Author: Harold Melvin Hyman
language: en
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Release Date: 2017-01-30
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
Justice Stephen Field
Outspoken and controversial, Stephen Field served on the Supreme Court from his appointment by Lincoln in 1863 through the closing years of the century. No justice had ever served longer on the Court, and few were as determined to use the Court to lead the nation into a new and exciting era. Paul Kens shows how Field ascended to such prominence, what influenced his legal thought and court opinions, and why both are still very relevant today. One of the famous gold rush forty-niners, Field was a founder of Marysville, California, a state legislator, and state supreme court justice. His decisions from the state bench and later from the federal circuit court often placed him in the middle of tense conflicts over the distribution of the land and mineral wealth of the new state. Kens illuminates how Field's experiences in early California influenced his jurisprudence and produced a theory of liberty that reflected both the ideals of his Jacksonian youth and the teachings of laissez-faire economics. During the time that Field served on the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation went through the Civil War and Reconstruction and moved from an agrarian to an industrial economy in which big business dominated. Fear of concentrated wealth caused many reformers of the time to look to government as an ally in the preservation of their liberty. In the volatile debates over government regulation of business, Field became a leading advocate of substantive due process and liberty of contract, legal doctrines that enabled the Court to veto state economic legislation and heavily influenced constitutional law well into the twentieth century. In the effort to curb what he viewed as the excessive power of government, Field tended to side with business and frequently came into conflict with reformers of his era. Gracefully written and filled with sharp insights, Kens' study sheds new light on Field's role in helping the Court define the nature of liberty and determine the extent of constitutional protection of property. By focusing on the political, economic, and social struggles of his time, it explains Field's jurisprudence in terms of conflicting views of liberty and individualism. It firmly establishes Field as a persuasive spokesman for one side of that conflict and as a prototype for the modern activist judge, while providing an important new view of capitalist expansion and social change in Gilded Age America.
200 Notable Days
Author: Richard A. Baker
language: en
Publisher: Government Printing Office
Release Date: 2006
Comprised of 200 readable and informative historic vignettes reflecting all areas of Senate activities, from the well known and notorious to the unusual and whimsical. Prepared by Richard A. Baker, the Senates Historian, these brief sketches, each with an accompanying illustration and references for further reading, provide striking insights into the colorful and momentous history of The World's Greatest Deliberative Body. Review from Goodreads: "Jason" rated this book with 3 stars and had this to say "This coffee table book on Senate History comes from none other than the U.S. Senate Historian, Richard Baker. The House of Representatives recently acquired noted historian of the Jacksonian era, Robert Remini as the official House Historian. He recently wrote a pretty impressive tomb on the House of Representatives. The Senate already has a 4 volume history written by US Senator, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, so the Senate could not reply in that manner. So, I think the coffee table book was the best that we could muster. I think this is the first time I have actually read a coffee table book from cover to cover. It is a chatty little story book filled with useful cocktail-party-history of the US Senate. That's useful knowledge to me, as I never know what to say at Washington cocktail parties. Perhaps anecdotes about Thomas Hart Benton will help break the ice. The most striking thing to me about the book was the number of attacks on the Capitol. I had heard about all the incidents individually, but it is more jolting to see them sequentially. 3 bombings, 2 gun attacks and then the attempt on September 11th. In a way, its remarkable that the Capitol complex remained so open for so long. Note, I use the past tense here. As any of you who have visited the capitol recently will have noted, it is increasingly difficult to get in. And once the Capitol Visitor Center is completed, I expect it will be very much a controlled experience like the White House. In any case, Baker's prose is breezy and he is dutifully reverent to the institution without missing the absurdities of Senate life. You also get a sense of the breakdown in lawfulness that preceded the Civil War. Its not just the canning of Charles Sumner, its also the Mississippi Senator pulling a gun on Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton in the Senate chamber. Then there is the case of California Senator David Broderick (an anti-slavery Democrat) being killed in a duel by the pro-slavery Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. Apparently, back in those days, California was a lot more like modern Texas. In any case, the slide toward anarchy can definitely be found long before Fort Sumter. Another interesting aside that I really never knew concerns the order of succession. All of us learn in school that it is the President, then the Vice President, then the Speaker of the House and then President Pro Tempore of the Senate. After that, you get the members of the Cabinet, and I was aware that as new departments were created, they have been shuffled up a bit. What I did not know, is that Congress was not always in the order of succession at all. For a long time, it devolved from the President to the VP and then directly to the Secretary of State. Furthermore, when they first inserted Congress, it was the President Pro Tempore of the Senate who was third in line over the Speaker of the House. The structure we all know and love was only finalized in 1947 after some hard thinking in light of FDR's demise and the Constitutional Amendments on succession that followed. Anyway, this is a book for government geeks. If you are one, its a nice read and about as pleasant a way to introduce yourself to Senate history as I have found. If not, there are prettier coffee table books to be had."