The Hughes Court: Volume 11

‘No one understands the politics of law better or takes the law more seriously than Mark Tushnet. With a complete mastery of the decisions of the Hughes Court, Tushnet shows us the justices as they saw themselves, professionals of disparate backgrounds, temperaments, and talents, dispatching, with the tools at hand, the disputes that ceaselessly came to them. Familiar constitutional landmarks are here, as is the high drama of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Court-packing’ plan, but so are more gradual changes in the law of the presidency, the administrative state, the federal courts, civil liberties, and civil rights that ended with the nation on the verge of a new constitutional order. Despite economic calamity and social strife, the Supreme Court thrived, not by being above politics, but by proving its worth by doing its job.’ Daniel R. Ernst, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal History, Georgetown University Law Center‘In this tour de force, a master doctrinalist unpacks some of the twentieth century’s most significant cases. In the process, he brilliantly unlocks the mystery of the Constitutional Revolution of 1937 that did not happen, investigates the invention of federal jurisdiction, explores the evolution of the administrative state, and illuminates the transformation of modern American liberalism. Bravo!’ Laura Kalman, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara

Mark Tushnet is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law emeritus at Harvard Law School. After graduating from Harvard College and Yale Law School, he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He has written widely on constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, and US legal and constitutional history. His book The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education (1987) won the Littleton Griswold Prize awarded by the American Historical Association.