Revivifying Political Science: Lucas A. Powe, Jr., on the Warren Court MELVIN I. UROFSKY The Supreme Court is studied by a variety of scholars—historians, political scientists, soci ologists, economists, and law school professors of all types. While the focus varies according to individual interest—religious scholars will be especially concerned with Establishment and Free Exercise Clause distinctions—for the most part all of us try to look at what the Court does in a larger context. A particular case dealing with free speech must be read not only in terms of prior Court cases but also within the boundaries of free speech theory, public considerations, and current controversies. When I first became interested in the Su preme Court, political science was dominated by people who recognized that the Court, as a coequal branch of government, had to be viewed through the lens of political activity. With this understanding, men such as E. S. Corwin, Alpheus T. Mason, and Walter Murphy wrote stimulating and classic works on the role of the Court in American society. They had not only a historical understanding of the Court, but also a sense of how the insti tution functioned within the parameters of government dictated by the Constitution. Alas, the “institutionalists” have been driven out of many political science depart ments and replaced by bean counters. For these “behavioralists,” nothing is important except numbers—how many opinions, who voted with whom, and so on. I remember reading an online review by a behavioralist of a book on the Court in the 1940s that relied, among other things, on recently opened manuscript collections, oral history memoirs, and the most recent scholarship. The review dismissed the book as having nothing to teach readers, since it did not have any charts, ta bles, or other evidence of numerical calcula tions. When I asked a friend, a political scien tist of the old school, what was going on, she just sighed and said that was what she had to deal with all the time. Now comes Lucas A. Powe, Jr., a 90 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY one-time clerk to William O. Douglas who holds the Anne Green Regents Chair at the University of Texas Law School. An ac knowledged expert on First Amendment law, especially as applied to radio and television, Powe makes it plain in The Warren Court and American Politics (Harvard University Press, 2000) that he is fighting this drift to ward number-crunching and wants to return to what political science used to be about when dealing with the Court: an understand ing of the cases, not just in their legal context, but as part of the broader stream of American political life. The book is a welcome change, and one can only hope that others will follow in Powe’s footsteps. The book is organized semichronologically , in sections of three or more chapters apiece. A listing of the section titles will give the reader an immediate sense of what Powe is about: “Beginnings: The 1953-1956 Terms”; “Stalemate: The 1957-1961 Terms”; “History’s Warren Court: The 1962-1968 Terms”; and “The Era Ends.” In his first three years as Chief Justice, Warren was getting his bearings even while having to deal with one ofthe most sensitive and politically volatile of all issues ever to come before the Court: racial segregation. By 1956, President Eisenhower had added John Marshall Harlan and William J. Brennan, Jr., to the Court, which was split almost evenly in two. The conservatives, headed by Felix Frankfurter, controlled four and occasionally five votes, with the liber als—Hugo L. Black, Douglas, Brennan, and the Chief—controlling just four. Powe shows that this apparent stalemate should not sur prise us as much as what the Court actually managed to do. Because the Red Scare tactics of McCarthyism and the Truman-Eisenhower loyalty programs so offended Justice Harlan’s innate sense of decency, he joined with the liberals to undo the damage caused by the Vinson Court’s opinion in Dennis v. United States (1951). Then came the appointments of Arthur Goldberg, to be replaced by Abe Fortas, and eventually of Thurgood Marshall. From 1962 onward, the liberals—those committed...