Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky In this issue, I am pleased to say, we have our usual medley, ranging from one of the iconic Marshall Court rulings to the twentieth century. There is fraud, pestilence, bad science, the free press, and how little Abe Fortas grew up and thrived in Memphis. And we also have Grier Stephenson, guiding the reader on new books regarding the Court. You have read many times in my introduction that the field of legal and constitutional history, while lively, is rather small, and that its practitioners, for the most part, all know each other. I can remember when one ofmy books came out, and my older son read the blurbs on the back cover, looked at who had written them, and then said to me “All the usual suspects.” Actually, I think it rather rare that when a book in this field comes out the author would not know the blurb writers. Charles Hobson is an old friend, whose work on the Marshall Papers is a model of manuscript editing. The case he is writing on is a favorite of law and history teachers because the great Yazoo land fraud is almost certain to get students talking. Why, they ask, should the fruits ofbribery and corruption not be taken away from those who profited from them? Why, indeed. Hobson, who is retired after teaching for many years with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College ofWilliam and Mary, shows that there are many sides to this case, and, although it remains the first time the Supreme Court declared a statute unconstitutional, by then it did not matter. We don’t get too many articles submitted about nineteenth-century state cases on the Bible, and we get about the same number about Stanley Matthews, who served on the Court from 1881 until his death in March 1889. As a Justice he is remembered primarily for three decisions that limited the power of the states, including the Supreme Court’s ruling in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886). But if Stanley’s tenure on the Bench appears rather drab, just the opposite is true of his pre-Court career: an antislavery Democrat in Ohio, a federal attorney responsible for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, a Union veteran of the Civil War, and one of the draftsmen ofthe Compromise of 1877, which 238 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY installed his Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House. Although a devout Presbyterian, Mat­ thews opposed religious instruction in the public schools, and led the campaign in Cincinnati to do away with Bible reading to start the school day. Linda Przybyszewski, associate professor of history at the Univer­ sity of Notre Dame, another well-known colleague whose work has previously ap­ peared in the Journal, looks at the famous (at the time) Cincinnati Bible War, and the rather interesting—and highly religious—arguments Matthews made. Although Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is often ranked as one of the three greatest Justices to serve on the High Court (along with John Marshall and Louis Brandeis), there has always been one stain on his escutcheon, that of Buck v. Bell (1927). By a vote of 8-1, the Court upheld a Virginia forced sterilization law, and Holmes’s short opinion is marked by the phrase “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” As several scholars have since taught us, neither Carrie Buck, her mother, nor her daughter were feeble-minded. In trying to explain the decision, the usual story is that in areas such as forced steriliza­ tion, Holmes and his Brethren believed the practice to fall within the police powers of the state. Daniel Frost, assistant professor of political science at Clemson University, however, shows that police power jurispru­ dence, with its insistence that there be no class legislation, was actually used in several state courts to strike down forced sterilization laws, and he asks why the High Court acted as it did. For years now, many of us in the field of legal history have emphasized that students need to know not only the holdings in important cases, but the facts that led to the litigation, and especially the...