Slavery and the Supreme Court

[lightreads]

Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861 by Earl M. Maltz


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Straight legal history, with a few side trips into SCOTUS Justice Biography and political history. Dry as dust, and kind of frustrating for the way it gestures casually at the thing I’m actually interested in without following through: the psychology of a legal regime wrestling with slavery and trying to keep the Union together. This book just rattles off some conclusory statements about what each Justice believed of the rightness and legality of slavery, then says something almost glib about recourse to neutral principles for decision-making, without ever really engaging with all the snarled tensions there. And you can’t tell me there aren’t historical documents.

To be fair, other people have tackled that project, and this book was – I think – deliberately meant as a purely legal historical project. I just happened not to find it useful or interesting.

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