Outspoken and controversial, Stephen Field served on the Supreme
Court from his appointment by Lincoln in 1863 through the closing
years of the century. No justice had ever served longer on the
Court, and few were as determined to use the Court to lead the
nation into a new and exciting era. Paul Kens shows how Field
ascended to such prominence, what influenced his legal thought and
court opinions, and why both are still very relevant today.
One of the famous gold rush forty-niners, Field was a founder of
Marysville, California, a state legislator, and state supreme court
justice. His decisions from the state bench and later from the
federal circuit court often placed him in the middle of tense
conflicts over the distribution of the land and mineral wealth of
the new state. Kens illuminates how Field's experiences in early
California influenced his jurisprudence and produced a theory of
liberty that reflected both the ideals of his Jacksonian youth and
the teachings of laissez-faire economics.
During the time that Field served on the U.S. Supreme Court, the
nation went through the Civil War and Reconstruction and moved from
an agrarian to an industrial economy in which big business
dominated. Fear of concentrated wealth caused many reformers of the
time to look to government as an ally in the preservation of their
liberty. In the volatile debates over government regulation of
business, Field became a leading advocate of substantive due
process and liberty of contract, legal doctrines that enabled the
Court to veto state economic legislation and heavily influenced
constitutional law well into the twentieth century. In the effort
to curb what he viewed as the excessive power of government, Field
tended to side with business and frequently came into conflict with
reformers of his era.
Gracefully written and filled with sharp insights, Kens' study
sheds new light on Field's role in helping the Court define the
nature of liberty and determine the extent of constitutional
protection of property. By focusing on the political, economic, and
social struggles of his time, it explains Field's jurisprudence in
terms of conflicting views of liberty and individualism. It firmly
establishes Field as a persuasive spokesman for one side of that
conflict and as a prototype for the modern activist judge, while
providing an important new view of capitalist expansion and social
change in Gilded Age America.
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