Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky Writing the introduction to some issues of this Journal is fairly easy, because the articles all derive from the Leon Silverman Lecture Series and—more or less—are bound together by a common theme, such as the Civil War and Reconstruction or the great dissenters. Those issues always interest me because they help me to understand that era or that practice much better. On the other hand, more often than not, the Journal has a wonderful potpourri of articles that are all over the map, and so I learn new things about different topics. It makes writing the introduction a bit harder, but that is a small price to pay for seeing things— some of them old friends even—in a new light. I have known Barry Cushman since he was a graduate student at the University of Virginia, and his dissertation on the New Deal cases made all of us who have written on that era rethink some of our assumptions. He has been a frequent contributor to the Journal, and his topics have included diverse areas such as clerks and docket books. In this issue he examines the judicial vote in an important case, Coleman v. Miller (1939), in which the Court declared that the question of limiting or extending the time needed to ratify a proposed constitutional amendment was a “political question,” in the hands of Congress and not the courts. Barry is currently the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. Another old case that gets a fresh look is Allen v. United States (1896), which involved what kind of charge a judge could give to an apparently hung jury, urging the minority members to reconsider. Known afterwards as the Allen charge, it applied only to federal courts. Gary Peterson is a practicing attorney in Oklahoma City. One of the “great” cases in Commerce Clause jurisprudence is Wickard v. Filburn (1942), in which Justice Robert H. Jackson seemingly stretched congressional reach under that clause about as far as one could imagine, to cover wheat grown in a farmer’s backyard for his family’s consumption. James B. Barnes wrote this article when he was a law student at St. Mary’s University 6 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY in San Antonio; he is now practicing commercial law in Austin, Texas, and is the managing attorney for the Barnes Law Group. Barnes is the student winner of the 2016 Hughes-Gossett Award. We do not get many articles on bank­ ruptcy cases, and truth be told, I do not remember any stirring cases I read in law school on this subject. Many cases are fairly limited, because the only law involved is the bankruptcy statute itself. But what happens when usual practice under bankruptcy, such as allowing a trustee to “abandon any property of the estate that is burdensome to the estate or that is of inconsequential value to the estate,” (§554(a)) collides with an environmental statute requiring the owner of that property to clean it up after dumping carcinogens into the ground? That was the question before the High Court in 1986, and is examined by Ronald Mann, Albert E. Cinelli Enterprise Professor ofLaw at Columbia Law School and Co-Director ofthe Charles Evans Gerber Transactional Studies Center. Although we do not rank Justices the way political scientists like to play at ranking Presidents, no one I know considers Gabriel Duvall, a Madison appointee who served on the Supreme Court from 1811 to 1835, in the top rank. During his tenure of the Court the issue ofslavery, which would tear the country apart in 1861, began to find its way into judicial cases. Andrew Fede takes a new look at Duvall’s opinions on hearsay used as evidence in court by slaves seeking their freedom. Fede is an attorney in private practice in Hackensack, New Jersey. He is also an adjunct professor at Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, New Jersey. As I have mentioned a number of times, the field ofconstitutional history is not a large one, and nearly all of the practitioners know each other. Certainly I call two of the other contributors friends...