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EDITOR'S PREFACE This series will provide readers with a convenient scholarly introduction to the work and achievements of the Supreme Court of the United States. Separate volumes will examine one or more chiefjusticeships, illuminating the Court's contribution to constitutional law, international law, and private law during that time period. Assignment ofvolumes by chiefjustices' terms follows well-established historical traditions that may well be attributable to the now discredited view that ChiefJustice John Marshall dominated his colleagues on the Supreme Court bench. However, this series organization is not intended to apotheosize the ChiefJustices of the United States. Rather it seeks to place each chiefjustice into the context of his personal and professional relationships with other members of the Court. Thus its focus upon the chiefjustice is simply a means toward examination of all members of the Court. That viewpoint also facilitates examination of the way in which the Court conducted its business, since the chief justice is the primary manager of the flow of cases and opinions through the Court. Leadership in the collegial atmosphere of the Supreme Court is a function of interpersonal relationships, for the chiefjustice has no authority to command obedience. He must call upon the respect and deference that his associate justices are willing to accord him. Attention to the work of the chief justice inevitably requires close examination of all relationships among the justices. Professor Ely's volume, as the first to be published in this series, provides high standards of scholarship and readability for those which follow it. His subject is the chiefjusticeship of Melville W. Fuller, a man of considerable ability elevated to the chiefjustice's position in part due to unusual political circumstances. Fuller was a successful Chicago lawyer well placed in the Democratic political organization. When nominated by ix x EDITOR'S PREFACE President Grover Cleveland he was ranked among the leadership of the Illinois bar, and was known for his conservative political philosophy. He brought to the Court a gift for efficient management and a talent for moderating discord. Fuller was the beneficiary of his wife's success as a hostess, and frequently entertained his Court colleagues at dinner. Rightly Ely refrains from pressing Fuller's claim to intellectual ascendancy among the justices. He gives due credit to the substantial and creative contributions ofJustices Stephen]. Field, David Brewer, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Fuller Court, and many of those following it, have been viewed in historical scholarship as proponents of laissez faire jurisprudence, based upon the supposed influence of social Darwinism in all areas of American life. It was this Court that decided Lochner v. New lVrk (1905), providing reform-minded law professors and historians a new term of opprobrium, "The Lochner Era." Against this background Professor Ely's book is mildly revisionist. He demonstrates that while the Court favored economic growth and free competition as a general pattern, there are many decisions which delimit business and economic freedom when the public interest dictated that there be governmental restraint. An intriguing aspect of this volume is Ely's description of a Supreme Court that seems to have had its feet firmly planted in nineteenth-century values ofJacksonian democracy. Yet it increasingly had to grapple with twentieth-century problems of economic regulation, complex federal -state relations, and international affairs. Beneath what appears to be a relatively calm period of the Court's history, the law's adaptation to societal change continued to gain momentum. Change was in the air during the Fuller years, and Professor Ely, without diverting attention from the Supreme Court, nevertheless makes the reader aware of the extrajudicial events of the day. They included the maturation of the labor union movement, the rise of agrarian discontent and revolt, and the growing political power of reform-minded individuals at the local, state, and national levels. Written lucidly with a broad view of the place of the Supreme Court in American history and life, this volume provides readers with a comprehensive view of the Fuller years and helps to modify the pro-business stereotype that has so long discouraged scholars from taking a more balanced view of law in the Gilded Age. Herbert A. Johnson ...

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