Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces that Changed a Nation by Steven P. Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces that Changed a Nation by Steven P. Brown R. Volney Riser Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces that Changed a Nation. By Steven P. Brown. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2020. 280 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-2070-6. Decorated Auburn University political scientist Steven Brown’s Alabama Justice offers in book form a more complete portrait of the cases featured in his recent travelling exhibit of the same name that was offered in conjunction with the state’s recent bicentennial commemorations. To be clear, though, this is no mere companion volume. Rather, it is a broad-ranging and useful primer on Alabama’s peculiar place in American jurisprudence. Brown selected seven landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions that originated from actions by Alabama state and municipal officials and an eighth, which examined U.S. Department of Defense policies as they operated upon service members stationed in the state, that originated in the state’s federal courts. These cases address criminal procedure (Powell v. Alabama); First Amendment cases involving free association [End Page 192] (NAACP v. Alabama), press freedom (New York Times v. Sullivan), and state-sanctioned religious practice (Wallace v. Jaffree); legislative and municipal apportionment (Gomillion v. Lightfoot and Reynolds v. Sims); discrimination in public accommodations (Katzenbach v. McLung); and sex discrimination (Frontiero v. Richardson). Brown devotes a concluding ninth chapter to the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices from Alabama: John McKinley, of whom Brown authored an excellent biography [John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2012)], John Archibald Campbell, and Hugo Black (who notably took part in six of the eight decisions Brown examined). Though Alabama produced two Supreme Court justices in the nineteenth century, the state did not generate landmark Supreme Court decisions until the twentieth century. The notorious Giles cases of 1903–1904 were the first, and the state’s remarkable run of (usually) Supreme Court defeats only began in the 1930s, a decade when, perhaps not coincidentally, the state adopted as the official motto “We Dare Defend Our Rights.” As Brown notes in his introduction, inquiries into Alabama’s role in U.S. Constitutional jurisprudence are perhaps not properly framed as “Why Alabama?” but “Why Alabamians?,” and over the course of the twentieth century at least a plurality of the voting populace sanctioned and cheered successive attempts by the state’s officers and legal advocates to stand athwart prevailing national jurisprudential trends (3). This does not claim to be a comprehensive catalog, either, of all the times Alabama or Alabamians directly or indirectly came before the nation’s highest bar. Wallace v. Jaffree, the “moment of silence” case is included, while Marsh v. Alabama, one of the 1940s Jehovah’s Witnesses cases, is not. Lightfoot v Gomillion is here, but Mobile v. Bolden, which limited the former’s application, is not. And, neither the infamous Giles cases, which effectively sanctioned the state’s 1901 disfranchisement scheme, nor Hunter v. Underwood, which struck down the first infamous iteration of Alabama’s “moral turpitude” standard for criminal disfranchisement, are here. This reviewer mentions these not to fault Professor Brown, who operated within literal and figurative space constraints, but to underscore the point [End Page 193] that Alabama’s frequent appearances in weighty twentieth-century jurisprudential disputes extend well beyond the pages of this text. Professor Brown has laid down a valuable marker for Alabama’s place in U.S. Constitutional jurisprudence, one that simultaneous commemorates the prior two hundred years and that can serve as a foundation for scholarly work, reflection, and law-making to come. [End Page 194] R. Volney Riser University of West Alabama Copyright © 2022 Alabama Historical Association