Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky This issue of the Journal is of particular satisfaction to me. Those who have read my introductions over the last two decades know how much I celebrate the diversity that has developed in the study of the Court’s history, and while there is a theme in the issue that carries theprevious year’s lecture series, regular issues present articles that range across the landscape, from case studies to biographical entries to features about the “Marble Temple” (it doesn’t seem right to just call it a “courthouse”) to pieces about what the Justices do when they take offtheir black robes. When Louis Brandeis received a copy of Charles Warren’s monumental three-volume The Supreme Court in United States History (1922), he wrote back congratulating Warren on having “performed an important public service,” and praising the book’s content and style. Then he said, “Much having makes me hunger more,” and sug­ gested that Warren now undertake a history of the lower federal courts. (Brandeis to Warren, 23 June 1922). For me, “much having” also makes me hunger for more, and like many scholars working on the Court’s history, I spend (too much) time lamenting that no one has done this study, or that an important case or Justice has not received the attention they deserve. In this issue, some (but far from all) of that hunger is slaked. Among that group of Justices whom scholars generally agree are inthe “firsttier”— people like John Marshall, Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Hugo L. Black—all have had one or more solid scholarly biogra­ phies written about them. The one exception is Robert H. Jackson, who served on the Court from 1941 until his untimely death in 1954. Jackson has, ofcourse, figured prominently in books about the Court during his tenure, such as Noah Feldman’s Scorpions (2010). So the news that University of Virginia professor David M. O’Brien, who is a noted Court scholar as well as a member ofthe Journal’s editorial advisory committee, is at work on a study ofJackson is welcome news indeed, and we can look at his piece in this issue as a harbinger of things to come. You will receive this issue in the midst of the presidential election campaign, and so v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY William Ross’s article on the Court as an issue in prior elections will be relevant indeed. When I teach my courses in constitutional history, I emphasize to my students that the Court is apolitical institution, not in a partisan sense, but because the Framers designed it to be one of three coordinate branches of government. While the Justices of the Court deal injurisprudence, the results oftheir labor have consequences, and so it should come as no surprise that their decisions—or even their personal behavior—becomes fodder during election periods. While we are certainly aware of how this has played out in recent campaigns, Ross, a Professor of Law at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama, shows that it has been going on far longer than many ofus imagined. Many years ago, I became converted to the idea that, in order to truly understand a case, one had to know notjust the legal issues involved, but the parties as well. Over the past thirty years we have had a number of books, articles, and collections that have taught us a great deal about the men and women whose cases have made our law. But, “much having” only makes us want more. Helen Knowles helps satisfy some ofthat hunger in her article about Elsie Parrish, the Washington State chambermaid who sued her employer under the state’s minimum wage law, a case that eventually became one of the key decisions in the constitutional crisis of 1937. This is Ms. Knowles’s second appear­ ance in the Journal. In 2006 her article on the role of Solicitor General Archibald Cox and the Reapportionment Cases won the Society’s Hughes-Gossett Award for an essay written by a student. She wrote this piece while teaching at Whitman College in Washington State, returning, ifyou will, to the...