When runaway slave Anthony Burns was tracked to Boston by his owner Charles Suttle, the struggle over his fate became a focal point for national controversy. Boston, a hotbed of antislavery sentiment, provided the venue for the 1854 hearing that determined Burns's legal status, one of the most dramatic and widely publicized events in the long-running conflict over the issue of fugitive slaves.

Earl Maltz's compelling chronicle of this case shows how the violent emotions surrounding it played out at both the local and national levels, focusing especially on the awkward position in which trial judge Edward Loring found himself. A unionist who also supported enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, Loring was committed to the idea that each individual case should be decided by reference to neutral principles, which ultimately led him to remand Burns to Suttle's custody. Although, as Maltz argues, Loring's decision was indisputably correct on the facts and justified by existing legal precedent, it also ignited a firestorm of protest.

Maltz locates the Burns case in arguments over slavery going back to the Constitution's rendition clause, then follows it through two iterations of federal statutes in 1793 and 1850, a miniature legal war between the governors of Massachusetts and Virginia, and abolitionists' violent resistance to federal law. He also cites Loring's intellectual honesty and determination to apply the law as written, no matter what it might cost him.

As the last of a series of high-profile disputes in Massachusetts, the Burns case underscores the abolitionist attitude of many of the state's residents toward the fugitive slave issue, providing readers with a you-are-there view of an actual fugitive slave case hearing and encouraging them to grapple with the question of how a conscientious judge committed to the rule of law should act in such a case. It also sheds light on the political costs and consequences for any judicial official attempting to deliver a decision on such a controversial issue while surrounded by a hostile public.

A story as dramatic and compelling as any in our legal annals, "Fugitive Slave on Trial" dissects an important historical event as it sheds new light on the state of the Union in the mid-1850s and the events that led to its eventual dismemberment.

Constitutional theory, Earl Maltz argues, has reached a critical impasse marked by a largely unproductive stalemate between originalists and nonoriginalists regarding the proper role of judicial review. It's time, he says, for both sides to rethink their positions if any hope for a more viable model of judicial review is to be realized. This book is his answer to the dilemma.

Maltz reorients the debate between originalists (those who believe that judges should be bound by the original understanding in constitutional adjudication) and nonoriginalists (those who believe the original understanding should not be binding). Advocates of both sides, he shows, generally proceed from three misguided premises: that originalism is linked to both judicial deference and political conservatism; that originalism is the sole alternative to some less deferential approach to judicial review; and that the question of "legitimacy" is the central unresolved issue facing nonoriginalist theorists. This book challenges each of these premises.

Maltz's contribution is threefold. First, going beyond the influential writings of authors such as Raoul Berger and Robert Bork, he reformulates the justification for originalist review and refines originalist theory itself. Second, he argues that a pure originalist approach mandates excessive judicial intervention under the Constitution; as he points out, the same argument that justifies interventionism in individual rights cases might also require the court to limit sharply the power of the federal government to regulate the economy. Third, he shows that--even leaving aside problems of legitimacy--most nonoriginalist theorists have failed to provide a sufficient functional justification for nonoriginalist intervention.

The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments are the cornerstone of much of American constitutional law. They provide the foundation for the Supreme Court's decisions on issues such as abortion and affirmative action, as well as the authority for a wide variety of important civil rights legislation. It is thus not surprising that the original understanding of those who drafted the amendments remains a hotly debated topic among historians, lawyers, political scientists, politicians, and anyone interested in civil liberties. The so-called Reconstruction Amendments are perhaps the most highly politicized issue in U.S. constitutional history.

The textbook understanding of the three amendments is that, collectively, they "abolish slavery and guarantee civil rights and the suffrage to U.S. citizens, including former slaves" (from The New Columbia Encyclopedia, 1975). Much of the debate among scholars centers on the nature of the guarantees and the scope of the civil rights and liberties encompassed by the amendments (particularly Section I of the fourteenth).

In this provocative book Earl Maltz provides an important new perspective on the debate. Heretofore most legal scholarship has focused on the drafting of the fourteenth amendment in isolation. Maltz argues that the political dynamic that produced the fourteenth--that is, the voting coalition of Radical Republicans and the moderate, more conservative Republicans--can only be understood by considering the three amendments together. Through a close analysis of legislative proceedings and of the precise language used, he builds a strong case that the civil rights actions (Freedman's Bureau Bill, District of Columbia suffrage, Civil Rights Act of 1866) and the thirteenth (1865), fourteenth (1866), and fifteenth (1870) amendments of the early Reconstruction era generally reflected the ideology and intentions of the conservative Republicans. These "moderates" advocated limited absolute equality rather than total racial equality and opposed the federal regulation of private and state actions. Maltz demonstrates that each of the amendments was carefully drawn with an eye to preserving the basic structure of American federalism with its characteristic emphasis on the need to preserve state autonomy. His conclusion is that currently popular open-ended theories of the fourteenth amendment undermine this autonomy and are thus inconsistent with the understanding of those who produced the Reconstruction Amendments.

The slave Dred Scott claimed that his residence in a free state transformed him into a free man. His lawsuit took many twists and turns before making its way to the Supreme Court in 1856. But when the Court ruled against him, the ruling sent shock waves through the nation and helped lead to civil war.

Writing for the 7-to-2 majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney asserted that blacks were not and never could be citizens. Taney also ruled that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, upsetting the balance of slave and free states. Earl Maltz now offers a new look at this landmark case, presenting Dred Scott as a turning point in an already contentious national debate.

Maltz's accessible account depicts Dred Scott as both a contributing factor to war and the result of a political climate that had grown so threatening to the South that overturning the Missouri Compromise was considered essential. As the nation continued its rapid expansion, Southerners became progressively more fearful of the free states' growing political clout. In that light, the ruling from a Court filled with justices sympathetic to the Southern cause, though far from surprising helped light the long fuse that eventually exploded into Civil War.

Maltz offers an uncommonly balanced look at the case, taking Southern concerns seriously to cast new light on why proponents of slavery saw things as they did. He presents the arguments of all the parties impartially, tracks the sequence of increasingly strained compromises between pro- and anti-slavery forces, and demonstrates how political and sectional influences infiltrated the legal issues. He then traces the impact of the case on Northern and Southern public opinion, showing how a decision meant to resolve the question of slavery in the territories only aggravated sectional animosity.

By presenting a more nuanced picture of the pro-Southern justices on the Court, Maltz offers readers a better understanding of how they came to their opinions, even as they failed to anticipate the impact their decision would have-a miscalculation that to some degree undermined the Court's power and authority within the American political system. Ultimately, as Maltz suggests, this is a story of judicial failure, one that remains a vital chapter in American law and one that must be mastered by anyone wishing to understand the peculiar nature of our national history.

During America's turbulent antebellum era, the Supreme Court decided important cases--most famously Dred Scott--that spoke to sectional concerns and shaped the nation's response to the slavery question. Much scholarship has been devoted to individual cases and to the Taney Court, but this is the first comprehensive examination of the major slavery cases that came before the Court between 1825 and 1861.

Earl Maltz presents a detailed analysis of all eight cases and explains how each fit into the slavery politics of its time, beginning with The Antelope, heard by the John Marshall Court, and continuing with the seven other cases taken before the Roger Taney Court: The Amistad, Groves v. Slaughter, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Strader v. Graham, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Ableman v. Booth, and Kentucky v. Denison.

Case by case, Maltz identifies the political and legal forces that shaped each of the judicial outcomes while clarifying the evolution of the Court's slavery-related jurisprudence. He reveals the beliefs of each justice about the morality of slavery and the judicial role in constitutional cases to show how their actions were determined by a complex interaction of political and doctrinal considerations. Thus he offers a more nuanced understanding of the antebellum federal judiciary, showing how the decision in Prigg hinged on views about federalism as well as attitudes toward human freedom, while the question of which slaves were freed in The Antelope depended more on complex fact-finding than on a condemnation of the slave trade. Maltz also challenges the view that the Taney Court simply mirrored Southern interests and argues that, despite Dred Scott, the overall record of the Court was not particularly proslavery.

Although the progression of the Court's decisions reflects a change in the tenor of the conflict over slavery, the aftermath of those decisions illustrates the limits of the Court's ability to change the dynamic that governed political struggles over such divisive issues. As the first accessible account of all of these cases, "Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861" underscores the Court's limited capability to resolve the intractable political conflicts that sharply divided our nation during this period.

Beginning with Brown v. Board of Education and continuing with a series of decisions that, among other things, expanded the reach of the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court that Richard Nixon inherited had presided over a progressive revolution in the law. But by 1972 Nixon had managed to replace four members of the so-called Warren Court with justices more aligned with his own law-and-order conservatism. Nixon's appointees-Warren Burger as Chief Justice and Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist as associate justices-created a politically diverse bench, one that included not only committed progressives and conservatives, but also justices with a wide variety of more moderate views. The addition of the Nixon justices dramatically changed the trajectory of American constitutional jurisprudence with ramifications continuing to this day. This book is an account of the actions of the ""Nixon Court"" during the 1972 term-a term during which one of the most politically diverse benches of the era would confront a remarkably broad array of issues with major implications for the future of constitutional law. By looking at the term's cases-most notably Roe v. Wade, but also those addressing school desegregation, criminal procedure, obscenity, the rights of the poor, gender discrimination, and aid to parochial schools-Earl Maltz offers a detailed picture of the unique interactions behind each decision. His book provides the reader with a rare close-up view of the complexity of the forces that shape the responses of a politically diverse Court to ideologically divisive issues-responses that, taken together, would shape the evolution of constitutional doctrine for decades to come.