The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790-1890. By Timothy S. Huebner. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1999. Pp. xiii, 263. Illustrations. $45.00.) Timothy Huebner seeks identify a judicial through a series of biographical profiles of appellate judges, somewhat in the manner of G. Edward White, who used this approach describe an judicial nearly twenty-five years ago. Where White's book traversed the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through portraits of more than two dozen Supreme Court justices and state judges, this study is more narrowly focused on six state judges whose careers spanned the nineteenth century. Indeed, five of these six judges completed their judicial work before the outbreak of the Civil War. As representatives of the southern judicial tradition, Huebner selected Spencer Roane of Virginia, John Catron of Tennessee, Joseph H. Lumpkin of Georgia, John Hemphill of Texas, Thomas Ruffin of North Carolina, and George W. Stone of Alabama. All were the leading jurists of their respective states and collectively represented the South's regional diversity and embodied the range of economic and educational backgrounds be found on the southern bench. Without claiming that these individuals constituted the entire spectrum of southern judicial attitudes and behavior, the author modestly asserts that they provide a vehicle for understanding the southern legal system within the American context (2). As his principal source, Huebner relies on the published reports of state supreme court cases, while also making use of personal correspondence, newspapers, statutes, and legal treatises. A central assumption is that cannot understand judicial behavior apart from the political activities and personal beliefs of those whom they study. He accordingly examines his judges not only formulators of legal doctrine but also as prominent citizens whose lives were deeply imbedded in the contemporary social values and political debates of the nineteenth-century (xi). The interplay between law and politics, between judicial independence and democracy, is a pervasive theme. On the evidence presented here, southern appellate judges both accommodated and resisted the prevailing political, social, and cultural currents of their region, with the scale tipped in favor of accommodation. Huebner defines the southern judicial tradition not in contrast an American tradition but as a regional variant of the latter. Southern judges operated within an increasingly nationalized legal culture and an increasingly sectionalized political culture, and the tension between the two lay at the heart of the southern judicial tradition (1). The author extracts the elements of the tradition by examining his judges' opinions and beliefs in four broad areas: homicide, economic development, federalism, and slavery and race. He confines himself these four issues, he says, because have argued that the region in some way distinguished itself from the North with respect each of these questions (4). One feature of the southern judicial tradition concerned the judges' self-perception as autonomous players in the lawmaking process, as promoters if not shapers of economic and social progress. While professing their allegiance the common law and deference the will of the legislature, the judges as a group felt free interpret precedents and statutes in a way that accommodated the changing needs of society. They were essentially pragmatic, innovative, and instrumental in their expositions of the law, never ceasing to conceive of judging as occurring within a social context (187-88). One identifiable cultural characteristic of the antebellum South was its predisposition violence rooted in an exaggeratedly masculine code of honor. Contrary historians who have indicted the southern legal system for its lenient attitude toward killing, Huebner persuasively demonstrates that his appellate judges uniformly resisted the culture of violence by rigorously enforcing the traditional common law meaning of homicide. …