John Marshall and the Constitution, a Chronicle of the Supreme CourtCorwin, Edward Samuel
History
John Marshall and the Constitution, a Chronicle of the Supreme Court
Corwin, Edward Samuel
Constitutional history -- United States; Marshall, John, 1755-1835; United States. Supreme Court
Marshall's great constitutional decisions are, of course, accessible in
the Reports, but they have also been assembled into a single volume by
John M. Dillon, John Marshall; Complete Constitutional Decisions
(Chicago, 1903), and into two instructively edited volumes by Joseph P.
Cotton, Constitutional Decisions of John Marshall (New York, 1905).
Story's famous Commentaries on the Constitution gives a systematic
presentation of Marshall's constitutional doctrines, which is fortified
at all points by historical reference; the second edition is the best.
For other contemporary evaluations of Marshall's decisions, often
hostile, see early volumes of the North American Review and Niles's
Register; also the volumes of the famous John Taylor of Caroline. A
brief general account of later date of the decisions is to be found in
the Constitutional History of the United States as Seen in the
Development of American Law (New York, 1889), a course of lectures
before the Political Science Association of the University of Michigan.
Detailed commentary of a high order of scholarship is furnished by
Walter Malins Rose's Notes to the Lawyers' Edition of the United States
Reports, 13 vols. (1899-1901). The more valuable of Marshall's decisions
on circuit are collected in J. W. Brockenbrough's two volumes of Reports
of Cases Decided by the Hon. John Marshall (Philadelphia, 1837), and his
rulings at Burr's Trial are to be found in Robertson's Reports of the
Trials of Colonel Aaron Burr, 2 vols. (1808).
Marshall's associates on the Supreme Bench are pleasingly sketched in
Hampton L. Carson's Supreme Court of the United States (Philadelphia,
1891), which also gives many interesting facts bearing on the history of
the Court itself. In the same connection Charles Warren's History of the
American Bar (Boston, 1911) is also valuable both for the facts which it
records and for the guidance it affords to further material. Of
biographies of contemporaries and coworkers of Marshall, the most
valuable are John P. Kennedy's Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, 2
vols. (Philadelphia, 1860); William Wetmore Story's Life and Letters of
Joseph Story, 2 vols. (Boston, 1851); and William Kent's Memoirs and
Letters of James Kent (Boston, 1898). Everett P. Wheeler's Daniel
Webster the Expounder of the Constitution (1905) is instructive, but
claims far too much for Webster's influence upon Marshall's views. New
England has never yet quite forgiven Virginia for having had the
temerity to take the formative hand in shaping our Constitutional Law.
The vast amount of material brought together in Gustavus Myers's History
of the Supreme Court (Chicago, 1912) is based on purely ex parte
statements and is so poorly authenticated as to be valueless. He writes
from the socialistic point of view and fluctuates between the desire to
establish the dogma of "class bias" by a coldly impartial examination of
the "facts" and the desire to start a scandal reflecting on individual
reputations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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