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Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky The world ofAmerican constitutional his­ tory is, on the one hand, vast; it covers every­ thing from the sources that the Founders knew and consulted in drafting the Constitution: the colonial experiences in self-government, the debates over ratification, the decisions of the Supreme Court, and the economic and political events of the times that shaped our constitutional heritage. On the other hand, it is narrow, in that there are a finite number of practitioners, and nearly everyone knows everyone else in the field. The annual meeting ofthe American So­ ciety for Legal History is one of the smallest of professional meetings, attended by 200 or 250 men and women, most of whom know each other on a first name basis. In some ways this makes the work ofyour editorial board much simpler, because when we get a piece from Christopher Waldrep or a Paul Kens, we know the person, we know their reputation, and more often than not we have been involved with them in one scholarly en­ terprise or another. It also made it much easier for me when I first took over the editorship of this journal to be able to tap men and women I knew were working on various aspects of Supreme Court History and ask them to con­ tribute articles. That relationship has been a strength ofthe Journal for many years now. In this issue three articles come from es­ tablished scholars. Chris Waldrep and Paul Kens have long been among our leading schol­ ars of nineteenth-century legal history, and both are now working on surveys ofthe postCivil War landscape. Professor Waldrep looks at how one of the major figures of this era, Joseph Bradley, tried to deal with the Privi­ leges and Immunities Clause ofthe Fourteenth Amendment, and the impact hisjurisprudence would have on future interpretation of that clause. Paul Kens is familiar to readers of the Journal as editor ofthe autobiographical writ­ ings of Justice Stephen J. Field. Given the ex­ poses of corruption in high finance that we have been reading about for the past year or so, we can drop back a century and a half to look at one of the great scandals of the nine­ teenth century, the Credit Mobilier scheme, which before it had run its course involved millions of dollars and implicated dozens of v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY government figures. Professor Kens looks at an area that usually escapes the conventional textbook treatment, namely, how the scandal involved the Supreme Court. George Rutherglen was one of my teach­ ers at the University of Virginia Law School more than a quarter-century ago, and I am delighted that he thought about sending his note to the Journal. Professor Rutherglen was working on some civil rights jurisprudence when he noticed an anomaly in the text of the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that he thought might be of interest to Court scholars. It is, and we are delighted to have him in our pages. Although the season so far has not been kind to the Washington Nationals, baseball fans in the nation’s capital always hope. For constitutional scholars, baseball also presents an opportunity for story-telling, since one of the on-going conversations involves why the Supreme Court allowed organized baseball an exemption from the antitrust laws. We have no less than the newest member ofthe high court, Justice Samuel Alito, contributing to this dis­ cussion in the lecture he gave to the Society last spring. Today when someone says “Justice Roberts,” we assume that he or she is refer­ ring to ChiefJustice John Roberts. But for the 1930s and early 1940s, the person in question would have been Associate Justice Owen Jose­ phus Roberts, who played a key role in the Court-packing crisis of 1937, and whom many believed changed his vote because of it. Why Roberts acted as he did has long fascinated scholars; nearly a half-century ago I wrote a paper in one of my undergraduate history classes at Columbia trying to figure this out. I therefore have a historical reason for wel­ coming the latest effort by Burt Solomon at untangling the puzzle. A...